Okay, Berks County. Let’s talk about houses that are hoarded. A lot of times people will ask us, “Do you buy hoarder houses in Berks County?” And the answer is yes. So I will tell you about the largest hoarder house we’ve ever purchased in Berks County. And then tell you a little bit about why selling a hoarder house for cash in Berks County is a good idea. Okay.
So we purchased a home in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania that was a hoarder property. The people that were living there were actually living in their car because they had hoarded the house so badly that they could not live in the house anymore. It was packed with stuff. It was a two story home. They had not been to the second floor in years, and that’s where the bathroom was. So they were sleeping in their car and utilizing a bathroom outside like an outdoor bathroom area.
The house was about 1100 square feet and it was hoarded from top to bottom. So it was packed with stuff. You actually couldn’t get to the second floor because it was hoarded shut. So there was so much stuff up there that it was packed, all the rooms were packed all the way down to the first floor. All the steps were full of stuff, and it was completely blocked off. There was a little pathway that went through the first floor of the house that you had to kind of squeeze down to shuffle, but you couldn’t see anything because the house was packed from floor to ceiling with stuff.
The homeowners were a little embarrassed to let us into the home and we don’t really mind. We’ve been buying houses cash in Berks County for over 12 years now. We have the ability to walk into any situation in a home and look past all the stuff that is in the property. So it doesn’t matter how badly the home is hoarded.
There’s different types of hoarding situations. Some people just hoard stuff. Some people aren’t cleanest hoarders so it’s garbage and trash, some people it’s just unopened boxes of things. If we’re able to salvage anything in a hoarder property, we will donate it to charity, but that is not always possible. A lot of times in hoarding situations, you have mice or other rodents that get in from the outside and they start chewing through things and just damage a lot of anything that might have been usable in the home. You also have a lot of situations where stuff is infested with cockroaches or bugs or fleas. And in those situations, we have to get pest control remediation into the property after it’s cleaned out and there’s not a lot of stuff that we can donate.
So in this situation with the house in Berks County, Pennsylvania, the largest hoard we ever did took eight 40 yard dumpsters. So eight really huge dumpsters to clean out the home. And most of the stuff could not be donated or used. It was very badly damaged. There were lots of mice and rodents and things in the home. So we got the home cleaned out. A lot of hoarder situations and hoarder homes, it’s a great idea to sell to a cash home buying company because we took care of cleaning out the property for the homeowner.
They did not have to clean out anything. We bought the house as is. We couldn’t see much other than the walls on the outside. We couldn’t see the heater, we couldn’t see the kitchen, we couldn’t see anything. The basement was completely hoarded shut, the kitchen was completely hoarded and we knew the bathroom hadn’t been used in years because the second floor was hoarded. So we weren’t able to really determine much by walking through the home.
Other than that, the walls and the bones of the home seemed to be in good condition. It just needed a lot of clean out. Normally, if you list a home on the market with a real estate agent, they want you to clean out that home. In the 12 years that we’ve been buying houses in Berks County for cash, whether it’s a hoarder situation or not, we take care of cleaning all the things and trash and junk out of a property.
If there’s anything a seller wants to take with them, we allow them to go back in and get the stuff that they want to take with them. They don’t have to leave it behind at the house. We also have pretty great clean out crews. So sometimes if they find something that looks like it might be sentimental to a homeowner, we stay in touch and try and contact that homeowner so that we can get sentimental items to them.
A lot of times they don’t know what happened to these sentimental items. And then when you start cleaning out the home, especially if it’s a hoarder home, you find a lot of things that they haven’t seen in years that we like to get back to the home owner. If you have a home in Berks County that is hoarded or you’re in a hoarding situation and you want a free, no obligation at all consultation to see what your options are for having someone come in and buy your home as is, without having to clean anything out give us a call 610-816-6205 or reach out to us via our website Berks610.com to see how we can help you with your hoarder home in Berks County.