In Abandoned Homes, The Remnants of a Life
Firm Finds Bittersweet Niche in Cleaning Up After Foreclosures

By Ben Hubbard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 24, 2008

Matt Paxton didn't know who used to live at 4404 Eames Ln. in Dale City, but he could gather some clues from what was left behind. "El Salvador" was scrawled in black marker on a dirty mattress. There was a partially built shed in the back yard.

Then there was a composition book in a pile of trash in the living room. On one page, a boy had written his name nine times. On another, he had drawn a three-story house with a swimming pool. The house in the drawing was much nicer than the one his family had abandoned after it went into foreclosure and Paxton's company was called to clean it out.

Paxton's business, Clutter Cleaner, specializes in "extreme cleaning," which, in Prince William County, has increasingly meant clearing out abandoned homes. The county's astronomical foreclosure rate has made junk disposal a growth industry. More than 4,500 properties in the county have gone into foreclosure this year, records show. In July, there were 945 foreclosures, the highest number since they started climbing two years ago.

Many tenants have left quickly, taking only necessities and leaving furniture, clothing, food, trash, appliances and even pets. But after a bank repossesses a property, all items must be removed before it can be put on the market. That is when Clutter Cleaner comes in.

About 5 a.m. each day, Paxton, 33, looks over the day's jobs, which he gets from a mortgage servicing company in New Jersey, and assigns them to his two Washington area crews. Some jobs require only changing locks to ward off squatters or cutting the grass to deter thieves. Others take hours, as workers remove a trailer's worth of garbage, often while fighting off cockroaches or dealing with the stench of mold or rotten food.

Paxton says his crews donate anything valuable to charity; the rest is hauled to the county landfill.

But Paxton sees remnants of people's lives in the trash, traces of the dreams they abandoned.

It still hits him, he said, when he finds a child's shoe, or a baby's milk bottles in a refrigerator. He has found wedding and graduation pictures. Almost all of the houses have tools, gardening equipment and cans of paint, he said, evidence of plans for home improvement. Once, in the concrete foundation of a home, he found two handprints belonging to a father and child.

"Clearly, this was their dream," he said. "They had built their home."

Perhaps the homeowners couldn't read their mortgage papers or had been misled by a sales agent, Paxton said. "I think 99 out of 100 of these things started with good intentions," he said. "And now there are someone's dreams, sitting on the back of my pickup."

Paxton started Clutter Cleaner about two years ago after his previous business ventures petered out. He had worked for the Federal Reserve in Richmond after college, but he said he hated the suit-and-tie office culture and quit after six months. He moved west and worked in casinos in Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, then took a job in Chicago before returning to Richmond when his father became ill.

After his father died, Paxton traveled in Hawaii, started a wet-suit company, then created a product called Paxton's Sandal Saver to clean flip-flops.

During a lull four years later, his grandmother paid him $1,000 to clean out her basement. A neighbor soon called for the same service. Other calls followed, and he made $3,000 in two weeks. Realizing there was a niche to be filled, Paxton started Clutter Cleaner with a Web site proclaiming: "There's nothing we won't clean."

Last August, a mortgage servicing company found the site and was soon giving Paxton five or six jobs a week in the Washington area. Business grew through the winter, but Paxton realized that having crews drive up from Richmond every day was costing too much in gas. So he and his fiancee moved to Falls Church in March, and he hired four workers he found on Craigslist. He has been busy ever since.

The work has changed how Paxton views the foreclosure crisis.

"I used to just think it was stupid people and people who didn't matter," he said. But his crews often find people still living in the homes, mostly renters who haven't been told the property has been repossessed.

"Especially in Prince William, we were getting a lot of families," he said. "We'd get there and there'd be six or seven hardworking families in a house and they'd say, 'What do you mean? We don't know anything about this.' "

More recently, Paxton's crews have cleaned houses that he says are so nice that he wouldn't mind moving in.

As good as business is now -- Paxton expects to bill more than $1 million this year -- he said it won't make him rich. He spends more than $1,000 a week on gas, plus wages and supplies, and he says he knows the work won't last forever. He said he expects the number of foreclosure-related clean-outs in Prince William to peak in December and decline next year.

He said he's pondering his next move.

"Somebody is going to find a way to buy a lot of these properties and manage them in a cost-effective manner," he said. "Because the same hardworking families who are getting booted from these houses are still going to be working hard and are still going to be looking for a place to live."

There is opportunity in change, Paxton said. He just has to figure out what his next one is.