In a New York City suburb, squatters took up residence in a vacant home that had yet to see any property preservation services. They lived there for three weeks. Imagine being next door to that kind of situation – where you had no idea who these people were or what they were capable of.

Biggest twist to the story? New York City had bought the property in order to rehabilitate it and help the neighborhood. Instead of taking any action, however, the city just continued to let it sit vacant for another few months.

We all know that property preservation is the biggest foreclosure business opportunity. But it’s also the most important. As I’ve written before, property preservation helps neighborhoods be safer and more secure. Abandoned homes are currently adding to community blight all across the country.

The slowness of the financial institutions that own these homes to deal with them has been frustrating to cities everywhere. So they’ve tried to take matters into their own homes. Unfortunately, they’ve just replaced the bureaucratic inefficiency of these financial institutions with their own bureaucratic inefficiency.

New York had the funds to buy 115 foreclosed homes and fix them up. After a year since Mayor Bloomberg announced this impressive goal, the Big Apple has bought exactly 8 homes – and hasn’t had property preservation performed on any of them.

San Francisco tried a different tack when it levied fines on owners of abandoned homes who left them to rot. It required these owners to register their vacant properties. Guess what? Over two-thirds of the owners simply didn’t register. Most people aren’t anxious to raise their hand and ask to pay a $750 fine.

It seemed like good news when government was finally starting to step in to handle the overwhelming number of foreclosures that desperately needed property preservation services. Now it’s beginning to look like they’re just prolonging the problem.

Our industry can live with that as we have more than enough foreclosures to keep us busy. But can America’s neighborhoods live with that?

If you’re interested in pursuing the amazing property preservation business opportunity, I invite you to visit www.REOResQ.com for more information on how we can help you get started.

The average American worker can no longer put their faith into just being employees of big companies. They end up lacking control of their future – because corporations are, as we’ve seen, quick to downsize when it’s necessary.

That’s why it’s a great time to start your own business – and a great time to make that business the property preservation business.

In this era of record-setting home mortgage defaults, property preservation is the biggest foreclosure business opportunity in America today, especially if you do it through our start-up system at REOResQ™. Start-up is affordable, training is fast (usually two weeks) and the demand for your services will be strong.

The banks that end up owning foreclosed homes need them cleaned out, repaired and brought back to market quickly so they can mitigate their mortgage losses. In addition, communities and local governments are demanding that vacant homes be secured and taken care of, before they become safety and health risks, not to mention posing a threat to a neighborhood’s property values and attractiveness.

That means a good property preservation company ends up working around the clock to keep up with the demand. Note that I said “good” – because many untrained people are attempting to get into this business that don’t know the special demands of it. Insurance costs, licensing issues, and the expectations of the master contractors that generally hire property preservation companies are all difficult to deal with if you haven’t been educated about them.

REOResQ™ franchisees get that training – and ongoing support – from professionals who know the property preservation game inside and out. My brother Scott and I both have the years of experience that enable us to get you started quickly in this lucrative line of work – and to skip the difficult beginning learning curve that you otherwise would have to get through by simple (and painful) trial and error. We know about that learning curve – we had to go through it ourselves!

Instead of trying more conventional job searches that are complete dead ends these days, I strongly suggest you check out the property preservation business for yourself. In a time when one out of five working men are out of work – and the job losses keep coming – this is one sector of the economy that provides an amazing opportunity.

It’s a new decade – I hope you’ll visit www.REOResQ.com to find out how to make an exciting new start.

If you’re thinking of starting a property preservation company, especially if this bad economy has you scrambling for cash, you should know your services will be in demand. The massive amount of foreclosures – some estimate the number of vacant homes at seven million – are going to need servicing sooner rather than later. Neighborhoods are fed up with dealing with abandoned homes and so are local communities.

When I said “Do the Math and Make the Money” in the title of this blog, I was serious. Most basic foreclosure trash outs pay anywhere from $200 to $500 – additional services, such as repairs, pool care and lawn care bring in even more money. These clean outs are easy to do and don’t take a lot of time – you can do several a day and make up to $10,000 a week once you’re established.

And it doesn’t take long to get established. We take two weeks to train our REO ResQ™ franchisees, that’s all that is required. But it is vital. My brother Scott and I have a lot of inside knowledge on what is required to succeed in property preservation – tricks and tips that will instantly put you ahead of the competition. Your other start-up costs are minimal – a truck and some tools, at most. Contracting experience is obviously of value, but not necessary.

We’ve already trained lots of folks who pursued starting a property preservation company – they knew the amazing business opportunity it presented in these times and they needed a fresh start. They got it and we’re proud to have helped them.

We can help you off to a new start as well if you’re in need of one. Again, there are millions of homes that need a property preservation company’s services – and the current field services companies can’t keep up with the demand.

I wish you all the best in 2010 and hope you’ll check out our website at REORESQ.com for more about us and what we do.

All across the country, neighborhoods are being presented with a new and growing crisis – empty homes that haven’t officially been classified as foreclosures or REO homes posing public health and safety risks.

I’ve written about this “shadow inventory” before – and the urgent need for REO sellers to process these homes quickly and hire the necessary property preservation experts to secure and maintain these homes. There’s no question that property preservation is already one of the biggest foreclosure business opportunities available – but there are still thousands of homes that need basic mortgage field services, just for the sake of public safety.

A recent article from UPI.com details just one of the crazy consequences of having too many vacant homes sitting out there. In San Diego, neighborhoods hard hit by foreclosures are breaking out in late night, illicit raves held in the abandoned homes. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has to recruit extra help to try to control these out-of-control parties that cause thousands of dollars worth of damage. One big soiree last summer even had a DJ and strobe lights!

“Whenever the door opened, it was like someone opened the door of a huge club, it was so loud,” said a neighbor, who, along with his wife, helped pick up hundreds of red plastic cups and liquor bottles littering the street the next morning.

There’s simply no need for this situation. Processing foreclosures, hiring property preservation companies and getting these houses back on the market is, again, in everyone’s best interests. Buyers want REO homes, as they are correctly perceived as a great buy.

At some point, property preservation companies will have to be employed – and the later they’re called, the more expensive and extensive the repairs that will be needed. That’s great for those of us in the property preservation business – not so great for the neighbors who are picking up empty booze bottles all day long!

Please remember, Property Preservation is the biggest foreclosure business opportunity around – and will be for some time. If you want to start a property preservation company, our nationwide franchise, REO ResQ™, will get you completely trained and up and running with your own business in a matter of weeks. Visit us at www.REORESQ.com to find out more about us and what we can do for you.

A recent article in “The Cleveland Plain Dealer” makes it plain that HUD’s continuing bureaucratic dysfunction is causing a lot of pain in local neighborhoods.

HUD, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, ends up owning homes when mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Authority go into foreclosure. More often than not, these homes sit empty in disrepair – property preservation companies and foreclosure contractors are not employed by the government to fix them up.

Not only that, but cities and local governments are helpless to do anything about these homes, because they’re owned by the Federal government, which “outranks” them.

In the Cleveland area, HUD has owned over 2000 homes in the last few years alone. They often sell these homes – again, without having any property preservation work done on them – to absentee landlords and speculators who have no obligation to keep the home up. HUD merely sells properties as is, without repairs, and generally places no conditions on buyers. And once a property is sold, the agency considers its responsibilities at an end.

Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, finally got so upset about one HUD house that was falling apart that it went ahead and illegally razed the home!

For a different take on how government action can actually help this kind of situation, please check out my article, “Property Preservation Pays Off for Florida County.” (Lindsay, please link to REORESQ Nov09 Art 2 here) Pasco County in Florida has used Federal dollars to buy foreclosed homes and hired property preservation companies to fix them up themselves, doubling the property value of many of these homes.

Same situation – much more effectively handled on the local level. At some point, REO Sellers and the federal government will realize that the faster property preservation and mortgage field service contractors are put to work on a foreclosed home, the better for everyone involved.

Please remember, Property Preservation is the biggest foreclosure business opportunity around – and will be for some time. If you want to start a property preservation company, our nationwide franchise, REO ResQ™, will get you completely trained and up and running with your own business in a matter of weeks.

Our incredibly affordable franchisee fees will be going up after the first of the year – so I invite you to at least check out this fantastic opportunity. Visit us at www.REORESQ.com to find out more about us and what we can do for you.

No one has really come up with an organized way to deal with the record-setting number of foreclosures – there will be 3 million in 2009, and 2010 doesn’t look like it will be much of an improvement, if at all. Soaring unemployment has sustained the mortgage default wave initiated by shaky subprime loans.

Now HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is speeding up the way it deals with property preservation companies and other foreclosure service companies. They’re going to make it easier for them to do the work and to get paid – two great goals.

I’ve been saying for months now that the old way of handling foreclosures isn’t practical for these times. The real estate industry is not used to this incredible amount of distressed property being a part of the landscape – and REO sellers are used to only dealing with a few foreclosures at a time, not hundreds or even thousands the way it is now.

But this is exactly why my brother Scott and I began REO ResQ™ early this year – we knew the demand for property preservation services would be unprecedented. And we also knew that, for those caught up in these horrible economic times, it would also be the biggest business opportunity they could imagine. Foreclosure clean outs has become an easy way to make big money – and this is the best possible moment to start a property preservation company.

Scott and I can get a new franchisee in business within weeks – we’ve already done it with our first ten franchises, as well as other newbies we’ve trained in the field. We make getting up to speed simple – because our inside knowledge helps you to succeed.

Our incredibly affordable franchisee fees will be going up after the first of the year – so I invite you to at least check out this fantastic opportunity. You owe it to yourself. For a minimal investment, you could have a whole new business that can more than take care of you and your loved ones during these hard times.
Visit us at www.REORESQ.com to find out more about us and what we can do for you.

The article, “What’s Left Behind,” was posted on the political Salon.com website on September 30th and you can view it here. It was written by a woman whose boyfriend does foreclosure trash outs. She ended up working alongside him and, truth to be told, ended up enjoying the adventure of it.

188 letters were posted in response to this article, many of them calling the woman and her boyfriend all kinds of vile names because they were part of the foreclosure process. To quote one that I can repeat in mixed company: “Listen, honey, you are the bad guys – you’re vultures.”

Fortunately, the majority of the posters seem to realize that this is a job that has to be done. For example:

“We need more people willing to come in and do what needs to be done to help clean up the mortgage mess on all levels. There are neighborhoods that are cesspools now thanks to people trashing their houses, and abandoning swimming pools to turn into mosquito breeding grounds. Someone has to clean this up.”

“I’m not sure what makes the posters here so angry about what she’s doing for a living. I honestly don’t think she needs a witness so much as she needs to be a witness, and for that she has my thanks.”

Let’s be clear. Foreclosed homes can not only quickly turn into an eyesore and keep a neighborhood’s property values down, but they also can become an extreme safety hazard as well. For example, at the moment, there is concern in the Atlanta area over some flooded vacant homes, not yet serviced by property preservation companies, that now have enormous mold problems and may have become inhabitable here)

Performing property preservation helps homes get back to a safe and saleable condition. And it’s not property preservation companies that are deciding foreclosures need to take place. They are just who gets called in to do a necessary and sometimes unpleasant job.

We take pride in training our franchisees at REO RESQ™ to get that job done correctly and professionally – to obtain the best possible outcome for both REO sellers and those who end up buying the homes. Visit us at www.REORESQ.com to find out more about us and what we do.

If you haven’t seen it, check out my new article, “Foreclosures:  Taking Care of the Yard Work,” where I write about how cities all across the country, already strapped for cash, are fining banks and lenders who aren’t tending to the lawns of foreclosures. Those bills can add up to over two hundred dollars for one grass cutting. Much more than you or I made as a kid mowing lawns!

But you can’t just point a finger of blame at the financial institutions left holding the bag (and the homes) after a homeowner defaults. It takes months to process a foreclosure and the record-setting number of them on the market makes it hard to keep up with the mushrooming inventory.

That’s why the grass can reach heights of two or three feet before a property preservation company is employed to take care of maintaining that lawn. Sometimes, the worst can happen, especially in dry, hot Southern California and Arizona climates – the parched lawn can just plain die and turn brown.

Just as folks in Ohio don’t want to see the lawn of the foreclosure house next to them turn into the rainforest, homeowners in Phoenix and Sacramento don’t want to have dead brown grass next to their property. It’s not good for property values that are already under siege.

How do we in the Property Preservation business handle that kind of extreme situation? Do we replant the lawn? Put down some new sod? Install Astroturf?

No. We paint the dead lawn green!

Banks and lenders don’t want to pay for a whole new lawn. It’s expensive and they’re going to sell the home as an REO property at a bargain price. At the same time, communities don’t want brown lawns popping up all over their neighborhood to make it look like a ghost town. So, usually, the most cost-efficient and easiest solution is to paint the lawn green. There are whole companies that we subcontract that only paint lawns.

That’s specialization.

And it’s one of the tricks of the trade we teach our new franchisees at REO ResQ™. My brother Scott and I spent years cutting our teeth on trash-outs, maintenance and repairs of foreclosure homes, never knowing this would evolve into a huge business opportunity with this historic REO boom. We learned a lot of the unique solutions to property preservation problems – knowledge we’re now excited to pass on to franchisees we’re training to become part of the REO ResQ™. That way banks and lenders as well as REO agents and brokers can be sure our franchisees will provide them with the best in professional mortgage field services.

Foreclosures continue to skyrocket – and property preservation is one sure-fire business opportunity that’s going to continue for a long time. If you’re interested in becoming an REO ResQ™ franchisee – or want to hire one of our current ones – please visit us at www.REORESQ.com for more information.

Now, if we can figure out how to paint pools blue, we’ll really be onto something

We train our REO ResQ™ franchisees to be incredibly efficient. They pride themselves on delivering trash out services on deadline and getting the job done on time.

But a recent story that came to my attention demonstrates that maybe a property preservation company can be too efficient!

Ted Poetsch, a man who lived his entire life in the same Minneapolis house, had been fighting legal battles for three years to keep his home. He ended up losing his final chance to avoid foreclosure this past May, and, in the middle of having lunch, he found out the city inspector, who had deemed the house unsafe to live in, had given him an hour’s notice to pack up everything and leave.

That’s almost an impossible task when you’ve been in the same place for 53 years. But Ted gave it a try.

As he was packing a few things, he happened to hear the noise of a power drill near his front door…

…and he discovered the house had been boarded up – with him still in it! And he had no way to get out.

Ted called his lawyer, who came over with a cordless screwdriver to unscrew the boards so Ted could finally escape – but then the lawyer discovered that special screws were used to board up homes and his screwdriver wouldn’t work.

So basically Ted was trapped inside a home that had been declared unsafe.

Finally, two hours later, a neighbor managed to pry off a board large enough so that Ted – and his 12 year old cat – could finally escape.

A representative for the contractor said that it was company policy to yell inside to see if anyone was in the house – apparently this particular crew didn’t yell loud enough. To be fair to the contractor, this was apparently the first time they had boarded a person inside a home. But they might want to invest in a bullhorn before the next house boarding – because apparently yelling just doesn’t do the job!

All I know is that we’d be doing some yelling at our own property preservation franchisees if one of them ever did anything like that. But we’ve got some awesome people with REO ResQ™ – and I can guarantee that’s not the kind of mistake they’re ever going to make. Visit us at www.REORESQ.com for more about our franchise.

Incidentally, they finally allowed Ted back to the house to get the rest of his belongings – but they wouldn’t take off the boards first. Not too helpful!

By Frank Patrick

When my brother Scott and I officially launched REO RESQ™, we obviously knew this was the right time to start a nationwide foreclosure home trash-out franchise. With foreclosures expected to continue on the rise for the next two years, REO Sellers and Master Contractors have more homes that need field services than ever before.

But, frankly, even we were shocked at the success of the Singletons, a couple we trained in property preservation in mid-2008. You can read their story in more detail in my article, “Starting a Profitable Property Preservation Company” – and hear an extended interview with them at http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=7824126.

What’s remarkable about the Singletons is that they had absolutely no experience in this field. We trained them, they decided on impulse to bet on Las Vegas, moved there in their trailer in August of last year, and immediately began picking up work – despite knowing no one in the city (or even the state!). And they’ve already grown to the point where, last month, they grossed $89,000 – and that was after their referral fees were paid to the Master Contractors that hire them.

The Singletons were a married couple whose business crashed and burned with the stock market – a not unusual story lately. What was great about them, though, was they recognized the opportunity property preservation experts and foreclosure contractors have at the moment – and weren’t afraid to jump at it.

What’s rewarding for Scott and me is to see how we can help two great people turn things around so fast for themselves. It’s clear the property preservation business is a self-starter, if you have the proper training. And the Singletons realize they’re on the front end of a boom – they know of one particular subdivision in Las Vegas that contains 100 homes. Of those 100 homes, only 2 have owners – and the other 98 have yet to revert back to the bank or lender that backed that development.

We’re extremely lucky that we already had years of experience in servicing foreclosure homes before the housing crash happened. We know the ins and outs of the business like few others. And we’re very happy to be able to share that expertise both with potential franchisees and the companies that hire our highly-skilled people.

Please feel free to visit us at www.REORESQ.com for more about our franchise and the property preservation business.