SELLING A HOARDER HOUSE

Selling a home can be frustrating, stressful and even discouraging.

Now imagine that home belonged to a hoarder, or needs a lot of repairs, or hasn’t had a thorough cleaning for years.

Hoarding is a genuine mental health problem.  It’s not that person’s fault.  Often, they need to move to a different place to start fresh, or even to start treatment.  Often a family member needs to step in to help with selling that house.

Uh oh. That’s a house selling problem.

There are tough choices to be made.  For example, family and friends can spend weeks cleaning and purging – but that will mean big sacrifices of their own time and energy.

A different choice is to leave everything except the valuables.

• Minimize hassles and headaches.
• Skip the cleaning.
• Ignore the mess.
• Leave items and garbage behind for us to deal with.
• Avoid multiple strangers and nosey neighbours walking through the chaos
• Preserve some of the hoarder’s privacy and dignity by selling quickly

Walking into a hoarder house can seem overwhelming at first.

Step back outside into the fresh air and think clearly.

What’s most important to you as the person helping this hoarder out of a difficult situation?  What is the least problematic path forward?

We don’t judge.  And you probably wouldn’t believe the houses we’ve seen!  Chances are very good that there are much worse houses out there than what you’re dealing with right now.  If we can help, great, if not, we won’t play games.  As the friend or family member who is tasked with selling that hoarder house, there’s no harm investigating all your options, before spending a mountain of time and energy on years worth of stuff.