This Florida crime scene cleanup business has a steady real estate pipeline in a tight housing market: extremely messy homes

• Spaulding Decon is known online for cleaning up crime scenes and hoarder houses.
• It has another business division: buying and flipping infested homes for sizeable profits.
• Even in a searing hot market, Spaulding has no trouble finding homes to clean and flip.

Content warning: story contains images of hoarding, neglect, and dead animals.

Laura Spaulding is the owner of Spaulding Decon, a business that does big cleanups, like crime scenes, hoarding houses, and meth labs.

She came up with the idea for the business in 2005, when she was working as a police officer and met a family saddled with the grim duty of crime scene cleanup.

In 2019, Spaulding Decon’s cleanup operation made $4.5 million in revenue, according to Inc. Magazine.

Revenue grew to about $10 million last year, and the company now has 56 franchises.

In 2016, Spaulding launched a real estate operation, which brought in about $500,000 last year, she said.

She buys messy, run-down properties at low prices from sellers who don’t want to deal with cleaning up the house and putting it on the market.

As the housing market has gotten more competitive in recent years, Spaulding’s real estate pipeline of extremely messy homes has remained untouched.

People call her looking for help cleaning up homes, some of which she buys — if the owners want to sell.

There is a “constant flow of houses coming in from people that cannot sell them on the market. They won’t pass inspection and require a cash offer,” she said.

“Investors typically spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying to find [houses]” she said. “And I don’t even spend a dollar.”

“I won’t ever do a deal unless it’s a win-win situation,” she said.

Spaulding said one home she renovated in 2021 was infested with almost 900 rats.

“The guy in there was just treating them like pets. He was leaving out dog food,” she said. It also was full of junk.

The rats would crawl through the house using tunnels they had chewed in the walls.

The owner was mentally ill, she said, and his family sold her the house for $92,000, property records show.

Spaulding and her team stripped the place down to the studs.

The renovation cost $55,000, and they turned it around in five weeks, Spaulding said.

The finished house sold in just two days $287,000, records show.

Spaulding said she earned about $122,000 in profit on the house.

Spaulding also worked on a house in Tampa, Florida, near the Busch Gardens theme park.

“You can literally see the roller coasters from the front yard,” she said.

The woman who had lived there had called Spaulding for help with hoarding clean-up years earlier, but the woman didn’t go through with it, Spaulding said.

Spaulding Decon will recommend a therapist and ongoing organizers for customers struggling with hoarding, she added.

After the woman died, her son called Spaulding, who bought the house for $30,000, records show.

“I had $7,000 just in landscaping because the trees had grown through the house,” she said.

They threw away all of the owner’s old stuff.

“We filled up four or five dumpsters, just in this tiny house. This house is less than 1,100 square feet,” Spaulding said.

The project took about three months, and Spaulding kept the house to rent as an Airbnb.

When possible, she said she prefers to rent the homes out herself, either to long-term tenants or through Airbnb.

The Busch Gardens house now makes about $3,000 to $5,000 a month in revenue from Airbnb, she said.

A third house Spaulding worked on last year was in Valrico, Florida.

Spaulding named it “The Lakehouse” for the picturesque Valrico Lake accessible via the backyard.

Spaulding said the 92-year-old former owner couldn’t keep up with their hoarding problem and called for help. “Why don’t I just buy this from you?” Spaulding asked.

The house had no running water, Spaulding added. “I don’t know where she was bathing.”

“I mean, look at the walls,” Spaulding said. “Absolute disaster.”

“Nothing was salvageable,” Spaulding said. “She literally walked out with the clothes on her back” and a check.

The team even had to coat the garage floor with epoxy to cover the smell of dog urine…

… but the finished garage was completely transformed.

An investment firm bought the renovated Lakehouse for $356,000, records show.

Records show Spaulding paid $120,000 for the house, and she said she spent another $120,000 on renovations, earning a profit of about $116,000.

Spaulding says she earned about a 54% profit margin on the rat-infested house.

By comparison, custom builder gross profit margins were around 18%, according to a 2014 survey from the National Association of Home Builders.