From Yahoo News, December 2010: A suit was filed in March by Pennsylvania homeowner Angela Lannelli. She was up to date on her payments when, she says, she arrived home in October 2009 to find that Bank of America had ransacked her belongings, cut off her utilities, poured antifreeze down her drains, padlocked her doors, and confiscated Luke, her pet parrot of ten years. It took her six weeks to get the bank to clean up the house.

The collapse of the housing bubble in 2007, and the wave of foreclosures that followed, created a cottage industry known as “property preservation.” The banks, ill-prepared to manage a sudden inventory of thousands of vacant houses and condominiums, soon mobilized a small army of guys driving around in pick-up trucks with a digital camera sitting on the front seat and a lawn mower and a leaf blower in the back. At the bottom rung of a lucrative industry that sprang up overnight, these workers earned around $20 for each “grass cut,” for which a middleman would bill a regional vendor, who would then add more to the bill and invoice the bank for the jobs.

It was a pretty sweet deal all around, even for the guys at the bottom. In Southern California, where I worked, the grass at most properties was usually quite dead, with only a few tufts of green along the sidewalk where runoff had managed to keep it alive. Many people whose houses are repossessed give up on watering the grass — or, for that matter, paying the water bill — long before the sheriff shows up with an eviction notice. In the business’s heyday, there might be as many as 15 vacant houses within a five-mile radius. Working off a route sheet created with Microsoft Streets & Trips, the game plan was to drive the shortest distance between properties, jump out and take “before” pictures, run the weed wacker, blow the sidewalks, then take “after” pictures and jump back in the truck to hustle on to the next house. In the evening, the photos were sent to the bank via email.

In California foreclosure process, when a person falls behind on a mortgage payment, they are subjected to a “non-judicial” legal process, the ultimate intent being to evict them from the house so that the bank can sell it to a new owner.

It starts with a notice of default, then escalates to a notice of trustee’s sale, where the property and its accompanying debt is offered up on the courthouse steps. If no one steps forward to buy the note, the property becomes “bank owned.” Sometimes, the bank offers “cash for keys” to the former owner, a bribe to get them to walk away peacefully and turn over the property in clean condition. Sometimes, it takes an eviction notice, a couple of sheriffs, and a locksmith. Sometimes, people just pack up and walk away on their own; other times, they trash the place before they move out, stripping it of all appliances, light fixtures, light bulbs, and, occasionally, the toilets. One way or another, they all have to go, leaving these properties vacant and in various states of disrepair.

That’s when the “trash-out” guys come in. As soon as the property is empty, they arrive with a crew, change the locks, and haul off all the trash and debris left behind — everything, down to the door mats and the potted plants and the Tupperware lids in the back corner of the kitchen cabinets. This process is euphemistically known as “initial services.” After initial services are completed, the grass needs to be cut twice a month. I started out in the property-preservation business doing grass cuts. Eventually, I ended up doing trash-outs, as well.

At the time, I was hauling as a second career. I had dropped out of the high-pay, high-stress white-collar workforce, and was hauling off trash for people clearing out the garage or for move-outs or backyard clean-ups, that sort of thing. One day, I picked up a last-minute job for a bank-owned duplex in Lakeside. I worked for a guy who was a middleman; he worked for another guy who had a contract with a major bank to take care of vacant bank-owned properties throughout San Diego County. A deadline had been missed, and a pile of dead wood and palm fronds needed to be removed from the duplex’s backyard, ASAP, so that it could close escrow. He hired me to take care of it.

When the job was completed, we met at a Denny’s in El Cajon, and he cut me a check for $400. A week later he called with a proposition. The main contractor had tasked him with all their grass cuts in San Diego County. At the time, the bank we were working for had about 400 vacant properties, from Oceanside to the border, and out east to Jacumba. I was invited to meet to go over the scope of the work and join up with a team assembled to carry out this monumental task. I drove to where the guy lived and met with him and a blonde surfer dude also hoping to make some fast money.

In addition to the biweekly grass cuts, the properties needed a monthly “maid refresh.” Each service paid a flat $20: $20 for the grass cut, $20 for the maid refresh. We would be self-employed subcontractors, with no benefits, no overtime, no workers’ compensation. The bank didn’t even know who was doing the work. All that was required was that we be legal citizens, have the wherewithal to upload digital images through a high-speed internet connection, and a willingness to work for a couple of months before getting paid. That, of course, eliminated the majority of the indigenous landscaping workforce in San Diego, which is how guys like me, with no experience, aside from occasionally mowing our own lawns, got into the business of mowing lawns for the banks.

The goal was to complete ten jobs a day, ten days in a row. It sounded too good to be true: driving around, weed wacking and picking up old newspapers and tidying up vacant houses, garnering around $400 per day — yeah, you read that right. The only catch was that we wouldn’t be paid until the pictures and invoices were sent to the bank and they’d paid the main contractor and he’d paid the guy I was working for. But, the guy said, “I guarantee you will get paid.” Here, I thought, was an opportunity to get out of the lousy cash junk-hauling gig I’d been scraping by on for the last couple of years. I joined the team.

Twice each month, the cheerful, friendly woman in charge of doling out jobs would send out an email proclaiming “The Grass Cuts Are Here!!” Each guy on the crew received a list of 60–80 properties, mapped out with driving directions to ensure the shortest route between jobs. They tried to give us properties close to where we lived, but there were always a few places out in the boondocks, in Campo, or Valley Center; those were the least desirable destinations.

I went to Sears and spent several hundred dollars for a gas-powered weed wacker (more properly called a string trimmer) and a leaf blower. I got a long-handled toilet scrubber from Home Depot. I changed the oil in the truck, and set to work. When the list came in, it signified the start of an eight-to-ten-day ordeal, working 12 hours at a time without a break, striving to make the deadline. You got a week off before the next batch came in.

I tried to get them to cut my workload — I was a 45-year-old guy with a torn-up left knee and a drinking problem — but as the months progressed, people kept quitting, and the workload stayed at no fewer than 60 jobs per cycle, sometimes as many as 100. You might get lucky and pick up a bunch of properties in the same neighborhood and spend your day driving from one to the next, not even enough time to smoke a cigarette before it was time to jump out of the truck, take pictures, run the weed wacker, blow the sidewalks, dump some Lysol toilet-bowl cleaner in the toilets and scrub them until they shined — $40, ka-ching — then move on to the next. On the easy ones, it took about 30 minutes. But for every easy job, there were properties that were long distances apart, or places with a thick growth of weeds that needed to be hacked down and raked up and hauled off, or dirty toilets and 2000 square feet of wall-to-wall carpeting that needed to be vacuumed. That’s where it got exhausting.

Then it started to rain. The formerly easy grass cuts turned into swaths of six-inch-tall crabgrass and cockleburs. I got behind, sometimes able to complete only eight jobs a day, sometimes having to drive to Alpine or Escondido, 40 miles from my starting point. I purchased a new lawn mower. At first, I got along pretty well with my middleman boss, but after awhile he was constantly on my back. He was a manic, workaholic type. All he cared about was meeting the deadlines, getting the dough. He fired off disparaging emails. “Hey slowpoke, pick up the pace.” He took to calling me “sugarbritches,” a nickname I despised.

Completing ten grass cuts and ten maid-refresh jobs in one day was a lot of work. But I sucked it up. I told myself, $400 a day, buddy. There were ways to speed up the process. If the trash-out guys had done their job, and the house was spotless, you could just take the interior pictures and send them in without doing any cleaning whatsoever. But I couldn’t stand leaving a bunch of weeds in a side yard, or a dirty toilet, so I toiled on; I did the best job I could under the circumstances.

But…the banks had quality-control people. What they wanted to see in the photos was “stripes.” When you mow a lawn, or run a vacuum, it leaves behind a pattern on the grass or carpet. When they started getting pictures showing room after room of carpets covered with footprints from the last open house, not a stripe to be seen, I suspect they denied a few payments. This is when the too-good-to-be-true aspect of the job started to manifest. After the first round of work, I expected almost $3000. But then the next round of grass cuts came in, and the next, and after two months we still hadn’t been paid. Meanwhile, I was meeting all my expenses out of pocket: gas, vehicle maintenance, equipment, $200–$300 every couple of weeks, and all I had to show for it were calluses on my hands and about 1000 miles of wear and tear on my truck and a disintegrating relationship with my girlfriend. When the first check finally came in, it was a nice chunk of change. It was also $500 short. The bank was overwhelmed, I was told. They’d missed a few payments, but the money was coming. And so it went, month after month, the checks short, a few stragglers coming in for work done months previously, but never all of it.

As far as the work went, eventually I toughened up to the point I could run that weed wacker all day long, day after day; it almost became an extension of my arm. I weed wacked in Alpine in a heat wave, 105 degrees. The noise from the two-stroke was a distant buzz, muffled by the shimmering heat, and I was sweating, buckets of sweat, ten hours at a stretch. In that kind of weather, you take slower steps and more frequent pauses. Time slows down, until you are encapsulated in the heat, the weed wacker’s buzz like locusts whirring unseen. You drink a gallon of water a day, kept in a cooler of ice, then sweat it back out; the cold water reduces your core temperature, so you can carry on. I got to where I could reduce a yard full of weeds to a crop of stubble and mulch in no time flat. The tricky part was not destroying ornamental plants in the process or sending a rock through a window.

But the late payments, that sucked, waiting for the mail to arrive, finding the box empty, day after day. When a check finally came in, two months after you’d done the work, it was short.

More people quit. The workload increased. It became obvious that about 10 percent of the money was never going to materialize. It was lost in the shuffle, hung up in accounts payable at some bank office, or sitting in the coffers of someone further up the food chain. “I guarantee you will get paid” turned into “I didn’t get paid, you are not getting paid, tough luck, and furthermore, my attorney says you agreed to an imputed contract to that effect.” It was messed up. Everyone was pissed off. More people quit. Still, I stuck with it. It was decent money, a source of steady income at a time when jobs were hard to find, and I figured that, when the time came to pull the plug, I could file a lawsuit in small claims court to try and get the rest of the money. Meanwhile, there was grass to cut.

There were rules of the game that, if ignored, caused problems. One was the before-and-after pictures. They had to be taken from exactly the same angle; if you were off by a couple of feet, you had to drive back and retake them.

There was also a murky area regarding “initial services.” As grass-cut vendors, it was a big no-no to do work on a property that had not yet had its initial services. Judgment calls were required. If the place was still full of trash, or had five-foot-tall weeds in the backyard, or otherwise looked like it needed initial services, we were supposed to take pictures, then skip the job, instead billing a “trip charge” that would pay us $10. We were forbidden to remove any personal property. This was because sometimes the former occupants left valuable items behind, and, legally, they had 18 days to come back and retrieve their belongings.

When a bank owns a property that has been foreclosed, they assign it to an REO (real estate owned) realtor who will get the listing when it goes up for sale. If the agent discovers the property vacant and abandoned, the bank is notified, and they have someone change the locks and haul off the trash. However, if it appears that the value of what’s left behind is more than $300, a notice is posted on the front door stating that the owners have 18 days to make an appointment with the agent and retrieve their belongings.

Sometimes, they’d send us to mow the grass and complete a maid refresh at properties that were still in this “post and hold” period, and we would find a house full of someone’s stuff. Jewelry, art, booze, 54 Chevy trucks in the barn. I never understood why, after they’d evicted the occupants and changed the locks, they couldn’t realize that initial services had probably not been completed. Maybe in the general chaos and confusion, they shotgunned out the list of every bank-owned property and left it to us to sort things out. At my level, it was like being a mushroom, kept in the dark.

We took pictures and sent them in by the thousands. I imagined some bank wonk in a cubicle in Texas, trying to keep track of several hundred thousand photos of lawns and toilets, determining which needed grass cuts and which needed trash-outs. Usually it was obvious, to us, whether the property had been abandoned, people leaving behind only things they weren’t able to stuff into a U-Haul — old patio furniture, worn-out shoes, and crusty barbeques. But the banks had a policy that, if a bed was present, it was an indicator that someone might still be living there. They’d put the property straight into the 18-day post-and-hold. Even a photo of a ratty, stained mattress on the floor meant that the stuff was off limits for 18 days. Three weeks later, we’d sometimes arrive to find the power off, a refrigerator full of rotting food, and a house full of rodents. Banks.

One day, I rolled up on a property out in Eastlake. There was a large dirt lot with a lot of weeds out in front. It looked vacant, abandoned. I got started on the grass cut, running my beat-up Craftsman weed wacker at full throttle over almost a third of an acre of dead weeds, little decomposed granite pebbles and nettles flying off and stinging my face. I was sweating profusely, another dirty job, one of about ten that day. Then I went to go inside the house to clean it, and the master key did not work. The locks hadn’t been changed yet, so I called the guy I was working for and asked what to do. He said, “You are not getting paid for that one, should have checked the locks before you cut the grass. Hey, dude, you’re just an independent contractor. Sorry, sugarbritches.” He was laughing, almost giddy, like this was some kind of hilarious joke on me. I did not find it amusing at all.

Another time, I went inside a house that had had the locks changed but not yet been trashed out. It was full of someone’s personal belongings. The place was in east Chula Vista, south of Eastlake, in one of the new subdivisions. There were a ton of foreclosures out there. Some of the streets were not even on the Thomas Bros. map yet, and the people were getting locked out of their homes. This particular property was a row home, with a small front yard maintained by the homeowners’ association. We only had to wack the little postage stamp of a backyard and do the maid refresh, easy money. I opened the door and stepped into the house without knocking, and stopped in my tracks, shocked to see that the place was full of stuff. Not the usual junk and trash; it looked like someone still lived there, with art on the walls, furniture, dishes in the sink. It felt like I’d walked into someone’s house uninvited. I thought they’d appear at any moment, saying, “What in the hell are you doing here?”

Over the year and a half I was doing grass cuts, I went through three weed wackers, four lawn mowers, two leaf blowers, and three digital cameras. The work was rough on lawn mowers, especially, because half the time you couldn’t see what you were mowing underneath the weeds. I killed a nice Sears 6.5 horsepower rear bagger on a rock in Fletcher Hills. I ran a White’s side bagger, my favorite lawn mower of all time, flat-out into the ground. I replaced the bent blades on it twice; finally, it gave up the ghost at a property east of El Cajon. I felt like having a funeral for it. In that time, I completed about 800 grass cuts, took around 6000 pictures of grass, before and after, and photos of perhaps 1600 clean and shiny toilets.

At the row home in Chula Vista, after I got over the initial shock of feeling like I’d walked into someone’s house uninvited and was critiquing their taste in art and furniture, I took pictures of the debris and sent them in so I could at least get a trip charge out of it. A couple of weeks later, there was a go-ahead on the trash-out and the job was given to the middleman I worked for. He did some of the trash-outs himself, to make more money while we were out mowing lawns. But he’d missed yet another deadline and needed to get it done, like, yesterday. So he called me and asked if I wanted to start doing trash-outs instead of grass cuts. I immediately agreed. The grass cuts were getting boring, and I’d always liked the trash business. As it turned out, the townhome in Chula Vista didn’t have anything especially valuable in it. The former owner had just packed up and left, taking what he wanted and leaving the crap he didn’t: an extensive VHS video collection, some Ikea furniture, magazines, art prints, dishes. It was the detritus of yet another person who’d walked away. Soon the condo was empty, cleaned to a sparkling shine and freshly vacuumed, without a trace of the former occupant.

Sometimes, people would yank out the refrigerator, leaving the line to the ice-maker dripping. It ruined the floor. Sometimes, you found pictures of children, pets, or homemade birthday cards, everything left behind in the chaos. It was a little sad, depressing even, one vacant house after another, silent, empty, bobby pins in the carpets jamming up the vacuum cleaner, a favorite toy left next to a sleeping bag and a pillow on the floor. It felt like cleaning up the aftermath of broken dreams. But you get used to it. People often left the booze, half-empty bottles of tequila, wine on the top shelf, various liquors, cans of beer left over from the last party, before they moved out for good. I made a rule for myself: if the seal on a bottle was open, I poured it down the sink. A gurgling fifth of Jack Daniel’s always gave it a fresh, clean smell, like a dentist’s office. One day, I found several bottles of French Champagne, $200-a-bottle stuff. I meant to save them for a special occasion but ended up drinking them, one by one, usually after I’d run out of beer. The decadent luxury of knocking back an expensive bottle of Champagne on top of a Miller High Life beer-buzz was one of the little perks of the job.

After a year and a half, it all fell apart. I was still owed a couple thousand dollars for grass cuts that had been done months earlier, and by then I was fully occupied hauling tons of trash out of vacant houses. It was a whole new ball game, but the same old story on payments. Always late, always short. It finally got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore.

I suppose we could have worked through it and built the business up altogether as a team, but by that point, I wasn’t interested in cooperation and teamwork; I just wanted the money for the work I had done. So I quit. For a few months, I waited for the payments to catch up, then I filed a small-claims action against the middleman for the rest of what I felt was owed me. As near as I could figure, it was about $2500.

I won in small claims, but the case was appealed to superior court. The appeals judge didn’t seem too impressed with either of us. He blandly suggested we step outside into the hallway and try and settle the matter during a recess in the hearing. I had the feeling I was going to walk away with nothing if the matter was decided by the court, so we settled with a handshake for $500, and the case was dismissed without prejudice. Typical to form, the guy didn’t have his checkbook with him, but after three weeks of unanswered phone calls and haranguing emails, he finally mailed me the money. And that was the end of it.

I still do a little preservation work now and then, not so much of the high-volume, fast-money stuff anymore, just a few freelance jobs here and there. I have people who work for me, and I do okay. I get to be my own boss.

I sit in front of the computer, uploading pictures, a cold beer on the desk. It’s addictive, working in the sun, and being out on the road, taking pictures, before and after, of the many tasks completed, and then viewing the results of the day’s work on a Microsoft slideshow. Day after day, ratty jungles are transformed into manicured lawns, so much trash is hauled off, and so many hidden treasures are found. We’re vultures swooping in on a dead carcass, salvaging the detritus of the unfortunate, making ugly things disappear, and making dirty places clean. I always pay the people that work for me, every dime, whether I get paid or not.