Preserving property is a job with growth

GROVELAND, Fla. (AP) — 393 Ed Douglas Road was a hot potato now, not a home — just another ghost property in the resale pipeline with curtainless windows, a yard populated by fire ants and weeds, and the telltale flier taped to the front door: “U.S. Government Property.”

Nick Hazel shoved a key in the lock.

Hazel leaned his mop against a wall, then walked the joint.

A broken dishwasher. Check. A countertop range stripped of its coils. Check. Fixtureless showers. Seatless toilets. Check, check. Wires dangling from holes gouged in the ceilings — the work of whoever relieved the place of its fans.

“At least these guys left the wiring,” he said, with a shrug.

Hazel, 40, is a “property preservationist,” which these days makes him a very busy man. With thousands of people defaulting each week on mortgages across central Florida, he’s one of a growing regiment of people the banks summon to “trash out” — sanitize and seal up — their foreclosure stockpile.

Among other labors, he mows waist-high lawns. He shoos away squatters. He duels wet rot. He boards up shattered windows. He replaces door locks. And, most often, he trucks away refuse so diverse, profuse and amorphous, that sometimes Hazel must squint to distinguish its components.

In short, it’s Hazel’s job to arrest the decay of a decaying housing market — a profession he likens to another the public views with angst. “It’s like I’m a dentist,” he says. “Nobody likes to see me. But when a house’s teeth go bad, who else is going to clean out the rot?”

His is also a profession with brilliant prospects. In an average week, Hazel inspects roughly 90 structures, secures 20 others, and trashes out between 10 and 20 “REOs” (bank shorthand for “real estate owned”). That’s up twofold from a year ago, when he got his start. He’s had to employ his wife, son and five other men just to keep up.

And so, even as the housing and mortgage crisis ravages lenders, homeowners, real-estate agents and construction crews, Hazel finds opportunity in desperate counties awash in abandoned, moldy structures — a paradox not lost on him.

He’s the last in line to notice the little things that once made a dwelling special to a family. And, as would be the case at 393 Ed Douglas Road, it’s ultimately up to him to trash them.

Since 2005, new foreclosures have tripled across the nation, to a record 2.25 million in 2008. This year, more are expected; banks filed to reclaim 1.5 million homes from January through June — up 15 percent from a year ago, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing service.

In Florida, where flipping houses was once a sport, the collapse has been particularly severe. This year, 1 in every 33 homes in the Sunshine State has received at least one foreclosure filing. (Nationally, the ratio is 1 in 84.) Only Nevada and Arizona were worse off.

When Hazel first got into the trashout business in May 2008, the first wave of foreclosures had already wiped out the flippers, and a second was washing away homeowners with “exploding” loans — mortgages with adjustable-rates that spiked after two years.