empty, foreclosed houses causing job opportunities

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/garden/19trash.html?_r=1


Foreclosure Trash-Out: Ill Fortune and Its Leavings


AT 6:30 on a Wednesday morning in February, James Brewer backed a pickup truck with a trailer into the driveway of a one-story beige house in a new subdivision called Murrieta Oaks and looked down at the day’s first work order.

“It’s 10 cubic yards interior, 5 exterior,” he told his three-man crew as they climbed out of the truck and pulled on canvas gloves. Within a minute, the four men had fanned out across the property.

Mr. Brewer walked from one mostly empty room to the next — the open kitchen equipped with new appliances, the living room with its working fireplace, the walk-in closet off the master suite — snapping “before” pictures for the bank that had recently taken possession of the house. Andrew Fisher and Mike Zurn followed close behind, sweeping telephone books, paper scraps and other random junk into plastic garbage bins.

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Just over an hour after they had arrived, they were done: the yard was clean, the house cleared, the “after” pictures taken. The men, members of a “trash out” crew charged with hauling away what’s left in foreclosed houses, had removed any sign of a home life from this one in Murrieta Oaks.

Mr. Brewer and his colleagues work for WSR Sales and Management, a real estate company based in nearby Riverside that has been around for 27 years, but has lately reinvented itself as a specialist in “home preservation” — the process of cleaning, securing and maintaining foreclosed properties for banks that begins with the process referred to as trashing out.

Companies like WSR have been starting up (or similarly retooling) across the country in the last year, particularly in the Southwest and Florida, where the mortgage crisis has done heavy damage. In these places, such companies are finding themselves “off-the-chart busy,” as John Plocher, WSR’s president, put it.

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AFTER the Murrieta Oaks job, Mr. Brewer drove alone to another house nearby to do an “initial” — the first viewing of a home to evaluate its condition. At 32, he has been doing trash-outs for just a couple of years (before that he was in the Army), but he is already a seasoned assessor.
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