Oh, Rats! The Surprises Sellers Leave Behind

Lurking in the depths of my garage, covered with an old blanket that I would never use again in a million years, is what my husband and I refer to as the “scary toxic waste container.”

It’s an old rusty reddish-orange canister resembling an apple barrel, about 4 feet high. It is sealed shut, so I have no idea what it contains, but when we moved into our Irvine home three years ago, it was left in the garage by the man who sold us the house. The city’s hazardous waste facility won’t accept it (officials say it’s not considered hazardous waste), and it wouldn’t be right to leave it out for our garbage man. My husband has more than once suggested we don black clothing and leave it in a nearby apartment complex dumpster. But we can’t bring ourselves to do that either.

So, when we move on to bigger quarters someday, we most likely will “accidentally” forget to take this big, ugly container of what we hope realy doesn’t contain anything toxic.

And we are not alone. Home sellers tend to leave all kinds of things behind when they move out, to the disgust or, much less frequently, the delight of the new buyers.

From pets to racy photographs to rooms full of garbage, real estate agents say they’ve seen it all.

“Phew,” said agent Carl Mitrak, when describing the bizarre scene he encountered when he walked into his buyer’s newly purchased home in Long Beach. “There were rats running around the bedroom,” recalled Mitrak, of Preferred Real Estate Investments in San Juan Capistrano. “We had to fumigate the property, but there were so many rats, it didn’t kill all the rats, so we hired kids with brooms to kill the rest.”

The owner had been forced out of the home because of city health and safety violations. The buyer purchased the property “as is,” forgoing the usual pre-inspections.

“We hauled away seven tons of trash,” Mitrak said. “The previous owner was a pack rat. He had old stoves, old refrigerators.”

Skip Zeleny, sales manager of Shorewood Realtors Inc. in Redondo Beach, said people tend to hold onto possessions thinking they will become collectibles. But when it comes to moving the items to their new residence, they often change their mind.

“They just don’t want to schlep it around,” he said. “They say, ‘It doesn’t have any value to us anymore, so we’ll just let the buyers deal with it.’ ”

And deal with it they must.

There’s the woman who bought an eight-unit building in Seal Beach. When she went door-knocking to meet her tenants, she opened one door and found a corpse.

And there’s the home buyer who found dozens of pornographic magazines tucked behind a bathroom mirror in a 1950s Rancho Palos Verdes house.

“Maybe there was a kid in the house, and he was hiding them there. You never know,” Zeleny said, chuckling at the memory. There’s the couple who was happy to buy a home with an “empty” fish pond, only to find it full of koi that the sellers said they didn’t know existed.

And there were the new owners of a home in Glendale who found something of a “very personal nature” under the bathroom sink, recalled Jennie Manders, an agent with Keeler Dilbeck Realtors in Glendale. The buyers were so embarrassed that they wouldn’t even tell Manders what the item was. The sellers had to go pick it up, she said.

There was the buyer who inherited a garage full of paint cans from companies that had long since gone out of business.

“In a majority of cases, people just don’t have a method for removing it,” Mitrak said of the leftovers. “It’s very disruptive for people to move. They’re overwhelmed. They’ve got other preoccupations. They just take what matters.”

This is especially true in situations where a spouse suddenly dies or there is a divorce, he said. “They take what’s on their back, and they don’t care. It’s bad memories.”

Taria Lewis, who specializes in selling foreclosure and short-payoff properties for ERA Westside Properties in Los Angeles, said she often gets the first look at how financially distraught, forced-out sellers leave their home.

“I’ve been to places that were so trashed, so smelly and stinky, so terrible, that I open the front door and look inside, and I can’t go in there,” she said. “I send someone ahead of me to clean up.”

Too often, sellers leave pets behind, and the results can be tragic, agents said. While neighbors or buyers often agree to adopt them, pets usually end up in a shelter, left to wander the neighborhood or worse.

Ken and Virginia Edwards left behind their 7-year-old cat Mittens when they sold their home in Torrance recently and moved to Hawaii.

According to the buyers’ agent, Chuck Chambers of Re/Max Palos Verdes, the buyers reluctantly agreed to adopt Mittens temporarily. But when the buyers had the home fumigated for termites, Chambers kept the cat at his home for the night. Mittens ran away and has never been found.

The Edwardses later sued Chambers in Small Claims Court for losing the animal, but Chambers said a South Bay Municipal Court commissioner ruled in his favor, saying that not enough care was taken by the Edwardses to find the cat a temporary home.

Better luck for a Venice Beach seller whose pet desert tortoise went underground into hibernation for the winter. He had to wait until the following spring to reclaim his beloved turtle.

The buyer of a Glendale home knew the sellers’ pet iguana had escaped while the house was on the market, but she still was aghast months later when the 3-foot-long “monster,” as she called it, crept up on her in the backyard, Manders said.

Sometimes sellers accidentally leave behind personal items such as a photo album on the top shelf of a closet or an important document in a kitchen drawer, leaving the buyer with an unwritten obligation to return it.

By state civil code for rental property, a landlord has 15 days to notify a tenant (18 days by mail) that property was left behind. If the property is worth under $300, the landlord may dispose of it.

But no clear-cut rule governs property left in a buyer / seller situation, said Neil Kalin, assistant general counsel for California Assn. of Realtors. He advises buyers who find property to send a notice to the seller (ask the seller’s real estate agent or escrow officer for the address) stating that the items have been found. Give them a few weeks to respond.

“If the buyer does that and the seller does not respond, the buyer can consider the property abandoned,” Kalin said.

Usually, left-behind items are useless to the buyer, such as broken furniture, old clothing or boxes of junk, agents said. And the buyers or their agents often end up tossing the items or paying to have the things hauled away for prices ranging from $20 to $100.

Temmy Walker, an agent with Prudential-Jon Douglas Co. in Woodland Hills, said that when buyers preview a house, they can anticipate how it will be left after the escrow closes.

“When people live in a messy state, you can pretty much expect that they’ll leave it that way,” she said. And it’s vice versa when they’re Mr. and Mrs. Clean, she added. “There are meticulous people who have cleaning crews come in and leave it spotless.

“There seems to be a lack of courtesy among today’s generation [of sellers], especially in California,” Walker said. “I do warn buyers that they may have to hire a trash hauler.”

And sometimes a buyer gets lucky.

A woman who moved into a home in View Park found a garage full of usable household items and a basement full of antique furniture. The seller, an elderly woman, had moved out of state into a small apartment and simply left everything behind, Lewis said.

Hey, maybe our scary, toxic waste container is really a precious antique . . . a World War II relic perhaps?