Grim Repo

The convoy rolled into Brookside, a collection of gated communities in Stockton, California, on a clear Saturday morning. Fountains arced from artificial lakes, but the streets were empty, and the double garage doors were all shut tight. Riverbrook Drive, Willowbrook Circle, and Brookside Road were quiet but for the creak of swinging For Sale signs and the ambient rush of Interstate 5. The place felt like Dodge before a gunfight.

We rode in a pair of black buses, their flanks plastered with images of big houses and cheering buyers. Blood red letters proclaimed: repohometour.com. With a gaggle of realtors and twenty-odd repo tourists, our bus was bursting. So were its sister ship and the half-dozen cars trailing behind.

We circled into Antique Place, a cul-de-sac ringed (according to the listing) with “executive” homes. The bus doors swung open.

“Vámonos!” bellowed realtor Jorge Espino, a man endowed with a salesman’s broad smile and a circus barker’s lungs. “Ten minutes, my friends!”

Smelling the blood of a fresh foreclosure, we charged across the sunburned lawn and up the concrete stoop of a beige stucco house. Shoes on, we dashed from room to room, up and down stairs, pawing scuffed drywall and soiled carpets, fingering scratches along walls. The house was barely nine years old, but it felt weary. Nobody had taken the time to patch the rough-edged holes in the drywall. You could feel the haste and despair of the erstwhile owners.

Espino stood in the vaulted foyer and hollered at us, “Beautiful house! Two thirty-four or best offer.”

“It went for five hundred just a couple of years ago,” interrupted one of Espino’s colleagues. “It’s basically a half-off sale!”

“Come on, who wants this house? Who’s at two twenty-one? Two twenty?” shouted Espino. He paused to check his watch.

“Okay, time’s up. All aboard! Vámonos!”

Thus began a typical day aboard the Repo Bus tour of Stockton, a farming town turned commuter haven an hour and a half east of San Francisco. Last year, more people lost their homes to foreclosure here than anywhere else in the United States except Detroit. That’s one in twenty homes. Americans are still passing around the blame for the crisis — to unscrupulous bankers, to blinkered lawmakers, to gullible homebuyers — but tragedy was the last thing on anyone’s mind this morning. Hell, Espino and his colleagues at Approved Financial and Real Estate had turned the ravaged housing market into a movable feast. There was pop and chips for everyone, and deals galore as we scavenged the suburbs for pieces of other people’s shattered American dreams. We hit a dozen houses in three hours. The bus vibrated with a euphoric sense of urgency, fuelled by the potential for easy riches.