Bakersfield.com: Kern County news, events, classifieds, shopping, & search

RSS Feed   Print Story   E-mail Story        

Gut-wrenching work: Real estate agents coax people from repossessed homes

By VANESSA GREGORY, Californian staff writer
e-mail: vgregory@bakersfield.com | Saturday, Apr 26 2008 12:00 PM

Last Updated: Monday, Apr 28 2008 11:44 AM

They know he’s from the bank.

The home’s former owner sits on the couch, cradling his head in his hands.

“You’ve made progress,” Kenneth Blanton, 77, tells the man.

The foreclosed northeast Bakersfield home is clogged with children’s toys and broken furniture. It’s Blanton’s job to document its condition for the bank and, perhaps, coax some cash from the lender to help the man and his girlfriend move out.

With 16 years of experience, the real estate agent is a veteran among a growing league who manage and sell homes repossessed by lenders. Four years ago, Blanton was the only agent in the city handling repossessions for Countrywide, he said. Now he estimates the lender contracts with about 20 Bakersfield agents — and that’s just one bank’s crew.

The agents are the human links at the end of a long chain of legal filings. And they know both the infuriating and heartbreaking stories behind foreclosure statistics as well as anyone.

As Blanton says, “If you work real hard at it, you become sort of a social worker.”

FIRST TO KNOCK

Last year, more than 3,000 properties were foreclosed on in Kern County, a 637 percent increase from 2006, according to the county Recorder’s office.

This year may be worse. Since July, each month has heralded a bigger foreclosure tally.

Most of those properties end up being owned by massive financial institutions. Banks then contract with local agents to manage dozens — even hundreds — of foreclosed homes. Agents earn a commission when the homes sell.

They are usually the first to knock on a home’s door after a foreclosure. Sometimes they find houses stripped of appliances or defaced by graffiti. Sometimes people are still home.

Unhappy tenants and ex-owners have slammed doors in Blanton’s face, sicced dogs after him and broken down in tears. Concerned neighbors get involved too.

“I had a gal chase me down saying, ‘When are you going to get that yard taken care of?’” Blanton said.

DAMAGE

On Tuesday, Laurie McCarty spoke by cell phone as she drove to see a county building inspector about getting a foreclosed dwelling up to code. McCarty is one of Bakersfield’s leading bank-owned specialists, managing about 250 properties with her staff of seven.

“A lot of times, it tears us up,” McCarty said of the job.

She has never been able to forget one family living in rural Kern. When McCarty showed up they were in shock. The couple insisted they had been paying their mortgage each month.

It turned out to be true, only they’d been paying to a man who had promised to refinance their home. He had transferred the deed into his name and neglected the monthly loan payments.

The house foreclosed without the family’s knowledge.

“It was a scam, and it made me feel horrible for those people,” McCarty said.

Much of her work consists of down and dirty property management. Trash must be hauled away and yards turned green anew.

About 30 to 40 percent of homes have been damaged by the time she arrives. Some have been trashed to the tune of $150,000 to $200,000.

“We have one property that we can’t bring to market yet because it’s a two-story home and there are no stairs in it,” McCarty said.

The bad behavior and callous actions of some foreclosure occupants have been eye-opening for Carol Burrell. She’s been in real estate for 28 years, but only in this niche since October.

“They’ve left with the wrought iron gates and the palm trees,” she said.

Blanton, the veteran, once walked into a backyard and found three abandoned adult Chihuahuas and a litter of pups. Another back lawn was home to four destitute families living in mobile homes.

These days, foreclosures pop up in upscale neighborhoods as well.

Burrell listed real estate agent David Crisp’s former Seven Oaks mansion at $1.2 million for HSBC Bank USA, N.A., a Delaware company.

But the stories behind many foreclosures are far less dramatic, said Denise Wigley, another newbie to the bank-owned business.

“What I’ve seen, in many cases, it wasn’t the owner’s fault,” Wigley said. “They didn’t just go out and overspend. They were put in the wrong loan, or they lost their job or they had health issues.”

All of it can weigh on the mind, Blanton said.

He was thinking about the couple living in the northeast home more than a week after his visit.

Blanton lived with his family in Kern’s infamous agricultural labor camps as an adolescent. But the filthy conditions in the couple’s home struck him as worse.

He likes the job, but it can be distressing and demanding to turn a single bank-owned home into a commission.

“We earn it,” Blanton said. “We earn it.”