Just before the bank took possession of a home in northwestern Riverside County, its former owners attacked the walls with paintball guns and smashed gaping holes in them.
They ripped out stair railings, banisters and cabinet doors in the half-million-dollar Eastvale (Corona) house. Then they turned on the upstairs bathroom sinks, put down the drain stoppers and fled as the bank's locksmith arrived to rekey the doors.
At least this is what real estate inspectors, working for the bank, concluded after they found the roughly two-year-old dream home soaked and halfway gutted. They say it wasn't even the worst that they encounter.
"You can walk into all kinds of things because the people are angry they are being evicted," said Lauren Rooney, a Corona agent who inspects homes just after lenders foreclose on them. "You get people who are really upset at the last minute, and they say, 'We are going to make the bank pay!' "
Lenders seized more than 1,000 homes in Riverside County in August and again in September. That's more than five times as many repossessed homes as in July and almost 20 times as many as in September 2006, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine-based company that monitors foreclosure data.
In Fontana, a man begged agents to let him take his newly purchased stove, but he quickly relented when they informed him it now belonged to the bank. A short time later, someone hurled a trashcan through a back window, Rooney said. Only one thing was taken: the stove.
I remember reading similar stories in the mid 90's during the last crash.
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