Mr. Bad News : Post the foreclosure notice, snap photo, and be sure to wear running shoes.
Jody Padilla dresses carefully for work every day in a sharp suit, crisp shirt and carefully chosen tie. But he fervently hopes no one will see him. That explains his footwear. “I always wear rubber-soled shoes,” he confided.
Five days a week, nearly eight hours a day, Jody Padilla posts foreclosure notices on people’s front doors.
“I can see where people get irate,” he said. “That’s why we try to be as discreet as possible. I try not to make any noise at all walking up to a house.”
As he sets out on his rounds this particular Monday morning, Padilla’s destination is the San Fernando Valley. His usual route is Palmdale/Lancaster, but a colleague has called in sick and the posting deadline is looming on several homes in wealthy Valley neighborhoods. He’ll also be making several other stops, hand delivering letters and other documents for his employer, Trustees Assistance Corp., which is one of a handful of businesses in the Los Angeles area that do the “leg work” of the foreclosure process for lenders.
At 11 a.m. Padilla arrives at this first posting in Sherman Oaks--well over an hour’s drive from his starting point. He cruises slowly up a pleasant, tree-lined street until he finds the house he’s looking for, an attractive gray stucco, nicely landscaped, with a well-kept front yard. As he stops his car just ahead of the driveway (out of visual range of the front windows) a large tabby cat jumps off the front porch and trots up the driveway, disappearing behind the house.
Padilla neatly separates the owner’s copy of the “Notice of Trustee’s Sale,” and puts cellophane tape at the top and bottom, folding the document over loosely to protect the tape. Then, with the engine running, he slips out of the car, grabbing his Polaroid camera as he goes. He walks quickly to the front door, tapes the notice to the jamb, then steps back a few feet, framing the door with the foreclosure notice clearly visible, and snaps a picture to prove the posting has been done. He’s back inside the car in less than 60 seconds.
This was a routine posting for Padilla, causing neither anxiety for his own safety nor any tugs at his heartstrings. But after just a year and a half in the business, the 25-year-old former construction worker has had his share of painful moments:
“At times I do feel like a bad guy. Like the time I posted the notice with the whole family sitting there in the living room--the adults knew what was going on. But when I went to take the picture, the little kids ran out and wanted to be in the picture.”
Then there was the time up near Dodger Stadium, in a neighborhood where Padilla didn’t feel comfortable.
“There were a bunch of gang-looking kids, sitting around on the front steps drinking beer,” he said. “I was kind of worried but I just walked past them up to the house. It turns out one guy’s mom was lying on the couch, she told me she’d been sick, told me all about the rough times they were having. All I could say was that I have to do this, it’s my job. But the look on her face was pretty sad. It gets to you sometimes.”
The job rarely gets to Steve Fine, owner of Cal Best Service Co. At age 51, he’s the veteran of thousands of postings.
“Generally, I don’t really know what’s going on with the people; sometimes it’s job loss, with that I can sympathize. But sometimes it’s divorce, or putting the paycheck up the nose,” he said. “I’ve posted at places where guys have BMWs and Porsches in the driveway; I can’t feel too bad for those.” His own car is a red Isuzu Impulse that bears a license plate which reads: “KICMOUT”.
Besides his license plate, Fine’s motto, “Neither rain nor sleet nor barking dogs turn the poster from his appointed rounds,” demonstrates both his sense of humor and his approach to the task.
“The idea is to get up (to the door), get the notice up and get out of there.” Dogs, he says, don’t seem to bother him because “I have a natural affinity for animals.” And he’s also had pretty good luck avoiding encounters with his subjects. “You have to move quickly and quietly--but you can’t look like you’re sneaking,” he said. “If you look like what you’re doing is OK, nobody will bother you.”
Occasionally Fine, who lives in Big Bear and mainly does postings in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, conducts seminars for colleagues in the real estate business. His first piece of advice? “Wear tennis shoes!” he laughs, “and carry a staple gun with a silencer!” Then he laughs again and admits there’s really no such thing. Like Padilla, he generally uses cellophane tape.
But unlike Padilla, Fine never wears a suit. “You shouldn’t dress up, because you look like part of the financial establishment. In case there’s a confrontation, I’m just the guy posting the notice.”
But Fine says he rarely encounters anyone as he goes about his rounds. And when he does, “The No. 1 rule is never argue with the owner of the house. Nobody ever pointed a gun at me, but I’ve had people chase me off and tell me to go away. When they do, I go away. But I always come away with a picture.” The snapshot is the poster’s proof that he has at least been to the property and attempted to serve the notice.
Once, Fine says, he took an extra picture, just as a keepsake. “It was during Christmastime. There was this Santa on the front door with a bag of toys. I put the notice so it looked like Santa was holding it. That’s the only time I ever took an extra picture for myself.”
Fine says he’s busier now than he has ever been. “It’s kind of hectic right now, the Reagan-Bush years were very good for my business. But I’m still a Democrat.” Fine estimates that he posts 70 notices a week.
On this day, as Jody Padilla drives the Valley, he has seven notices to post. His employer, with offices in the City of Orange and up north in Walnut Creek, posts about 1,300 foreclosures a month, 1,000 of those from the Southern California office.
Although California, with a foreclosure rate of 0.72% (or one home in foreclosure out of every 138 homes) is well below the national average of 1%, the percentage of homes in foreclosure in the state nearly doubled last year. And Southern California is outpacing the state. With one in every 70 homes in foreclosure, the six-county area from Ventura to San Diego is keeping firms like Fine’s, Padilla’s and the other businesses that perform this service, very busy indeed.
“It’s kind of like a roller coaster, this business--kind of like the economy!” said Renee Patrick, assistant vice president of Trustees Assistance Corp. Since Jody Padilla began at TAC, his workload of foreclosure notice postings has doubled and the company has added two new people to cover the Los Angeles area.
At Padilla’s next stop, litter, stacked telephone books and a tumbleweed against the front door make clear the place is empty. “I love this kind!” he said, hopping out of the car with notice and camera in hand. He says he’s not curious about the story behind every house he visits. But there have been some.
Padilla recalled a house he once posted in Palmdale. “That one looked abandoned, but as I taped the notice to the door, it swung open.” Inside he could see evidence that someone was living there. There was a makeshift cookstove and some bedding.
Strewn about were clothes, pornographic magazines and trash. “Lots of trash, and a terrible smell,” he grimaced. Padilla said he was curious about that one, but caution won out over curiosity. He turned and fled, snapping his picture as he went.
Padilla never wants to be on the other side of a foreclosure notice. “This could be us,” he says, gesturing with his thumb toward a ranch-style Woodland Hills house where he’s just taped more bad news. That’s why he and his wife, who works for the same company, haven’t bought a house yet. They say they’ve saved enough for a down payment but feel too nervous about making the commitment to a mortgage. “What if one of us lost our jobs?” he asked.
At a late afternoon stop in Granada Hills, Padilla couldn’t get to the owner’s front door because of the security system at the condominium complex. So he posted the notice on the main gate leading to the garage. “I’d hate that myself,” he said, anticipating the owner’s embarrassment. “And I hate to do it, but I’ve got no choice.”
Then he brightened. “Hey, we’re done. And nobody came out and tried to terrorize me--so it’s been a good day!”
Lagatree is a Long Beach free-lance writer.