The redemption of Hope? Whatever it takes.

When life hands you a lemon… make the most of it!

I shot my mouth off about throwaway homes, so life handed me one and told me to put up or shut up.

Well, it didn’t quite happen that way. Karen Mushier, a Sun City paralegal who handles wills, trusts, probates, etc., sat me down and explained to me how so many Sun City homes come to be thrown away: The last living resident dies with no heirs, and so it falls to the probate system to reckon with the estate’s assets and debts.

And then she did me one better, referring a badly-neglected property to me to list for sale. The heirs had been identified, and one of the two, designated as the ‘personal representative’ (think executor) of the deceased, was to be my client.

So: The owner had been old and ailing and her live-in paramour was a hoarder of the first water. He packed the house with stuff for around ten years, and then it was abandoned for another four. This is a view of the living room on the day I followed our locksmith – my nephew Tim Brannum of Lockology – into 10754 West Hope Drive:

The water was off but the power was on, and had been on without interruption for the four years the house sat empty – there were still-frozen Klondike bars in the fridge. Every room was stacked high with stuff – some of it just debris, but a lot of new-in-original-packaging merchandise.

A patio had been converted into a dining room at some point, and then that room had been converted into a barn-like kennel for big dogs. That particular space has impressed itself upon my olfactory nerve, seemingly permanently: I will smell those dogs forever.

The two front bedrooms were so packed as to be impassable, at first. Maybe half of their contents was landfill-bait: Huge tubs of old paper documents and VHS tapes. But the other half was resalable merchandise in huge quantities: Paper goods, especially, but all sorts of stuff, much of it obtained at clearance prices from places like Harbor Freight Tools.

I needed the house emptied, but I had no budget. So we had a sale, not in pursuit of money but of bulk-reduction: Everything you buy at a deep-deep discount is trash we don’t have to pay to send to the dump.

The house, the garage and the back yard we are packed with stuff that either could be sold or needed to be trashed. We spent Friday through Sunday emptying everything – and we made that part of Hope’s redemption pay for itself.

Friday was cheap, Saturday cheaper and Sunday was free – if it can be moved, remove it. A sweet lady wanted to search the kitchen for cookware, so I made her this deal: “If you touch trash, don’t just push it aside, put it in a trash bag.” As a result of that little speech, she got what she wanted and she cleaned the kitchen for me in the process.

The sale paid its own labor costs – one person outside selling, one inside removing stuff – plus it paid for the landscaping I had had done, and there was enough left over to pay a cleaner to follow up on the final trashout. But the real triumph was getting virtually everything off of the property at no cost to the seller.

Oh, but if only that was all that needed to be done. The next step, after the sale, was whipping the house into a more-presentable shape. It needed more than we could give it, but I wanted to put its best foot forward, which meant getting the rest of the debris out and dismantling clumsy home-handyman constructions like the dog kennels/stalls. An enormous job, and it was done from Monday to Thursday:

Next came my real function, listing the home for sale. Because it is in such rough shape, it could not qualify for conventional financing – cash or hard-money loans only. Even so, I made a wishbook listing, rhapsodizing the home’s past and future glory. We had met a number of monied Yuppie couples at the sale, and I was hoping for similarly-situated buyers: Cash-rich and eager to take on an adventure.

I met more of those couples as the house was listed, but none prepared to pull the trigger, alas. Instead, I heard from swarms of wholesalers, predatory and destructive. It took me three tries, but I figured out how make it safe to negotiate with them. We finished in 12 days-on-market, but at 90.90% of the Original List Price.

But Hope Drive’s redemption is but barely begun. We sold the home to a true investor, not a wholesaler, and he is already at work rehabbing the property. Here it is last night:

I’m eager to see what happens next for this home. When we took possession, its value was hidden under deep piles of debris. As we worked, we discovered the good bones that had been buried there all along. The next step in Hope’s redemption will be dramatic – so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, this experience illustrates perfectly the listing agent’s job in getting a home sold: Whatever it takes.