This week I was at the weekly team meeting at the Keller Williams office in Marina del Rey pitching a free Home Staging for Success course I’m going to be giving there next week. One of the agents, Reggie Potts, came up to talk to the group about a new company he’s launching called REO Secure. REO Secure will do everything from installing smoke detectors to rekeying the locks, boarding up the windows and strapping the water heater. The company is based in Culver City, but they serve the whole LA area.

If you know an agent, bank or asset manager that has REO listings, please forward this important information along to them. And if you’re ready to call REO Secure, their number is 310-251-1773.

The groups say that they have sometimes received support from neighbors and that beleaguered police departments have not aggressively gone after squatters. “We’re seeing sheriffs’ departments who are reluctant to move fast on foreclosures or evictions,” said Bill Faith, director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, which is not engaged in squatting. “They’re up to their eyeballs in this stuff. Everyone’s overwhelmed.”

The issue is a controversial one. Advocates see these vacant properties as an opportunity to ease the growing homeless problem in a declining economy. Though some of these groups operate secretly, others are out in the open, trying to secure legal means to move their clients into these abandoned properties.

Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, said her group had been looking into asking banks to give it abandoned buildings to renovate and occupy legally. Ms. Honkala, who was a squatter in the 1980s, said the biggest difference now was that the neighbors were often more supportive. “People who used to say, ‘That’s breaking the law,’ now that they’re living on a block with three or four empty houses, they’re very interested in helping out, bringing over mattresses or food for the families,” she said.

The organized homeless groups are also having to compete with more traditional individual squatters.

“We had a move-in that we were going to do one day at noon,” he said. “At 10 o’clock in the morning, I went over to the house just to make sure everything was O.K., and squatters took over our squat. Then we went to another place nearby, and squatters were in that place also.”

Mr. Rameau said his group differed from ad hoc squatters by operating openly, screening potential residents for mental illness and drug addiction, and requiring that they earn “sweat equity” by cleaning or doing repairs around the house and that they keep up with the utility bills.

I have to say this issue has me torn. I’ll admit I am a fairly left-wing liberal who appreciates the effort on the part of these advocacy groups to try to find a workable, though temporary, solution to a growing problem that no one else seems to be addressing. I feel for these people who, for reasons that may be beyond their control, have found themselves and their families homeless and unemployed in a dire economic climate. At the same time I work in the real estate industry and feel for the agents who represent these properties. I feel the banks are not doing enough to properly secure and maintain these foreclosed homes. They often leave them in a dilapidated state and just “hope for the best” in terms of a sale. Rather than investing a small amount in paint, carpet, Home Staging (and some sort of security system) in order to sell these properties quickly, they let them linger on the market and become targets for squatting.

What are your thoughts?