What things have you found in foreclosed/abandoned houses?

What things have you found in foreclosed/abandoned houses?

Mechanicsburg, PA · Member since 2013 · 3k+ posts · 2k+ votes

In the thread about the TV show Property Wars, it was brought up about things found in and on foreclosed property.

1. In a recent one there was the last occupant's ashes. I called the relative to come get the ashes. I've found lots of dead or live bodies but all were critters, mice, squirrels, rats, snakes, all kinds of insects, ground hog, possum, skunk, and even found a dead cat. I never found any dogs but one person told me they found a dog chained in the yard and another told me that they found a live dog locked in the house. I didn't see that dog but did see all the evidence that the dog left.

2. I found major parts of cars and cycles, and a few whole cars but nothing of any value or nothing even running.

3. The most of the money that I ever found was change, some coins and there always seems to be lots of pennies on the floors for some reason.

4. A friend of mine says that there are always tires at these properties, and for the most part that seems to be true. This last one with the person's ashes did have the obligatory 1 car tire on a wheel, which the trash company won't take if it has the wheel attached.

5. I've never found any gold or silver, and very few currency, usually some cash in an envelope, or stuck in cards or books. I do lots of reading but I never use currency as a bookmark.

6. Often times there are some tools, but they usually are incomplete, inoperable, or abused. Recently I've found some cordless power tools but strangely enough they almost always are missing the batteries.

7. I friend recently bought a foreclosure and took out three 30 yard dumpsters of trash from the house. They only thing that he took home with him was one extension cord. He say that was lightest haul he ever had from a foreclosed house and he remarked at the irony of this house having so much tonnage, but so little usable stuff.

8. One house that I got was vacant for 15 years, and have everything still there, clothes, furniture, shoes, and all personal items and even a car in the garage. There was even food in the frig that had been there for 15 years with the electric turned off. There were pots in the frig with leftovers and all the food was black, unrecognizable blobs. The odor was one I'll never forget, I almost gag just thinking about it.

9. Usually the stuff left behind is mostly junk and trash, things that are broken, or missing parts.

10. Several house were so over grown with trees and shrubs that you could not see the house from the street. One house I couldn't find because the house was overgrown as well as the dirt driveway.

11. Another place was owned by an alcoholic who hadn't cut his grass in 5 years. The grass was about 4 feet high and looked like a hay field. The people mowing the grass kept hitting whiskey bottles and beer cans scattered all over the yard and hidden in the tall grass.

What kind of treasures have you found in foreclosed/abandoned houses?

1Reply
443 views

Most Popular Reply

Wholesaler · Salt Lake City, UT · Member since 2009 · 1k+ posts · 401 votes
13y

Man are you guys making me relive past problems. My greatest find was in a foreclosure we bought to rehab and when we removed one wall we found it full of old time big bills, gold and silver coins, jewelry and other goodies. Now I had found out about California's treasure trove law years before, and finds like this were considered the property of the previous owner.

The age of the money made me think the previous owner was not the true owner so we started to research it and found out the owner had been born in that house and lived in it here whole life. She had no living relatives and had be dumped in a county contracted dying home that should have been condemned. Well it was a fortune and we handled everything after getting a guardianship, and she was able to be located into a fine convalescent home for her final years and to create a will to leave her estate to charity.

I felt very good about that but I have to confess my first thoughts were to hell with the previous owner, and how was I going to spend all that money but I could hear my mother's voice saying I will never be ashamed of you if you do what is right, advice given to me when I did something wrong and developed a ton of quilt and wanted to fix it.

See this reply in the discussion

91 Replies

Jump to latestLatest
  • Rental Property Investor · Douglas County, MO · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
    12y

    I found a half empty gallon jar of pickles and a sphygmomanometer in a kitchen cabinet.

  • Real Estate Investor · Sebastian, FL · Member since 2014 · 812 posts · 432 votes
    12y

    When working for someone else, he bought a run down house that looked horrible from the outside. He got it for $10k "as is and you clean the mess out yourself" from a nephew who had treated her well when younger, but hadn't seen her in years. It had sat for several years because he didn't want to deal with it. We went inside and it was beautiful. Well kept, beautiful antique furniture throughout. We also found a cigar box full of money (a few thousand dollars). My boss gave the money to the nephew and kept the extremely valuable furniture, silver set and china.

  • Investor · Southeast, MI · Member since 2012 · 2k+ posts · 1k+ votes
    12y

    I just found some Polaroids (remember those) of naked women. I remember Polaroid from when I was a kid. If I remember correctly, it cost $1 to take each photo back in the 80's. That's probably about $3 now for a low quality picture that you hope develops. 

    Now you can take high quality pics or video with your phone and magically send it to someone else anywhere in the world. Technology has come a long way........

  • Real Estate Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2013 · 42 posts · 23 votes
    12y

    We bought a pre-foreclosure one time several years back where the owners were hoarders. It was a bad divorce situation and the lady was a self proclaimed witch.  They had lived in the home for 25 years and I don't think they had ever thrown anything away. There was an entire bathroom dedicated to the cat where the bathtub was basically his litter box that hadn't been cleaned in a decade.  There were only pathways in the house to walk through and I kid you not when I say there were piles everywhere from floor to ceiling. There was only a place for one person to sit on the couch and the rest of it had stuff stacked to the ceiling.

    We gave them 60 days to move out. The day before the 60 days was up the witch lady called and said she needed more time but we couldn't do that. It ended up they left EVERYTHING in the house. So we start trashing out the house and I notice that a lot of this stuff is in unopened packages and the more we start cleaning out the place the older the stuff gets.  Turned out they had enough collectibles in that place they could have paid off their mortgage. I'm talking original Beatles albums as well as dozens of other collectible records, all in pristine condition.  We found almost $300 in change alone laying all over the place.   We sold everything off which pretty much paid for the rehab so it was well worth the extra work...

  • Involved In Real Estate · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2014 · 42 posts · 8 votes
    12y

    From Atlanta.. Was on the East side and a home had a huge hole in the roof and when we went in we realized there was the remains of a meth lab that had exploded and went threw the ceiling and the roof. Was Nuts. 

  • Investor · Howey in the Hills, FL · Member since 2013 · 376 posts · 114 votes
    11y

    I once found a copy of Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" in a foreclosed home. Oh, the irony.

  • Brooksville, FL · Member since 2012 · 429 posts · 220 votes
    11y

    WW2 Flag and purple heart...took me months to find the next of kin.  Along with it were love letters back and forth between the couple while he was overseas.    I wish i would of kept/framed them as they melted my heart for sure.     Gave them back to his next of kin (grandson) after 6 weeks of searching and I had to pay for the fedex label because he didn't really want it.   I remember saying, these are your grand parents don't you want them?....he was like ok send it to me, i gotta go to work *click*.   Never heard from again.

      
    I think we are up to 15 different rifles/shotguns.    Typically neglected and not worth much.  

    Then the normal things that everyone finds.... My guys typically get more value out of the scrap metal than the actual resell of items i think.    

    After being covered in fleas for the third time, i learned to stop walking through them till it's be cleaned out.  

  • Investor · Meridian, ID · Member since 2015 · 4 posts · 0 votes
    11y

    I owned a towing company and had a deal with sheriff to clear out properties being served a writ of execution and sometimes auctioning off items at my yard. 

    I had family members bid at the auctions and bought items for pennies on the dollar. Some notable items were a numerous vehicles including a 65 fastback mustang and a 05 vette, over 50 k in tools, tractors, farm equip,etc.

    Those were the good ones but we also had to  do writ of possessions on evictions. One was a mother and son paid 1st and dep and no more. Took owner a year to get writ done and we had to move them. They were hoarders and animal control took over 20 cats out of the house. The son was a transvestite drug addict with needles and porn and costumes and pics of his escapades everywhere. [HE WAS A COOK at a DENNY'S SCARY!] I still itch and have smell flashbacks everytime I see a cat and havent eaten out in that town since. We took over 10 loads with 21 foot flatbed trucks off the property. I had to store the good stuff per Sherriff and dumped the rest in my yard. Landlord [1st time investor] had to pay me and I felt so bad for her I gave her really good deal.

    So the tenants call wanting their stuff and they were supposed to pay the moving fees but I told them you take every scrap of your junk off my property I won't charge you a penny. They never showed, so I got stuck with getting rid if it. I called a guy with 2nd hand store and gave him everything free if he moved it all and he told me he made a bunch of money on the huge collection of antique coca cola stuff.

     To give you a idea of the nastiness of this place. As a teenager working construction, I helped demo a house a guy died in and wasn't found for weeks. He made  goat cheese in his living room on a wood stove, it had a dead St Bernard in it and trails through the house in between the empty canned food containers and this place looked like a hospital compared to the tranny house.

  • Real Estate Agent · Mechanicsburg, PA · Member since 2014 · 529 posts · 217 votes
    10y

    Older thread, but I wanted to search on BP for interesting items found in properties.

    Yesterday, while working on a property I found bullets.  Unfortunately no gun :(

  • Investor · Lakeland, FL · Member since 2016 · 105 posts · 61 votes
    10y

    Back in 1999, I found 2 Porn VHS tapes in a condo that I bought.

    In 2008, I found a few rounds of .45 ACP in the pool.. I had to drain it to have a new liner installed and there were a few rounds of .45 ACP.. I do have guns of that caliber but decided not to use that ammo ;-)

    In 2010, I bought a foreclosure... There was a Ford Windstar Minivan in the garage.. Junk car.. didn't run.. I ended up getting $100 for it from the "We Buy Junk Cars" people... They came and hauled it away.. 

    Most of the other homes that I bought were cleaned out pretty good by the banks that were selling them.

  • Investor · Downers Grove, IL · Member since 2015 · 1k+ posts · 955 votes
    10y

    An illegal unit in the garage. Supposed to be a duplex, and I bought it in a sheriff auction!

  • Mohrsville, PA · Member since 2015 · 57 posts · 10 votes
    9y

    Hubs and I looked at a property two years ago, right up the road from us; tried contacting the owner to no avail.  Thank God we couldn't get into the house - earlier this year another investor bought the property at a tax sale.  Turns out, the place wasn't abandoned, but the owner was.  The investor found the owner's body inside.  :-(

    If we'd tried to get into the house two years earlier, we would have found him.  The coroner said he'd passed away about three years earlier.

  • Mechanicsburg, PA · Member since 2013 · 3k+ posts · 2k+ votes
    9y

    Just saw a foreclosure, attic was covered with foil rigid insulation on all the walls and ceilings, and there massive amounts of huge industrial lighting.  It was not living space.

  • Lender · Greater LA/Orange County area, CA · Member since 2012 · 3k+ posts · 3k+ votes
    9y

    Dead owner

  • Investor · Capitol Heights, MD · Member since 2017 · 11 posts · 0 votes
    9y

    In my searching for property I was in florida once and found an extra bathroom that was enclosed and covered to make look like there was no bathroom, the layout of the house looked off, there was lack of space where there should be space, I drilled a hole in the wall to see and low and behold a complete bathroom with toilet, sink and bathtub/shower. I was happy with the find but my spouse freaked out and was convinced someone had left God only knows what (drugs, a corpse) in there. We didn't go back.

  • Investor · Ridgecrest, CA · Member since 2017 · 247 posts · 120 votes
    9y

    I found a 400k btu pool/spa heater in the unfinished garage of my first house which I just bought. I dont know if it works so I listed it for $200 on ebay. They go for over 2 grand new. I hope it sells cause it would be a pain to haul it to the dump.

Join the conversationCreate a free account to reply, vote on answers and follow this thread.