BiggerPockets

I cleaned out a rental home after college students moved out. Got $114.60 in bottle returns!

Valuable? Not really. Interesting? Sure.

TVs
Tivo
"Toys"
Old newspapers
Guns
Drugs
Porn
Animals and droppings
Thousands of baseball cards (value TBD)

I sometimes find furniture and great old books. As I don't have a home in the U.S., I let the other members of my team take all that stuff.

But recently I found a nice cold bottle of Guinness in the fridge. I don't think I was as excited about buying the house as I was about the Guinness. (My locksmith had to settle for a bottled Margarita which, as we all know, is not worth consuming unless it is made fresh.)

Recently found an old rifle, dozens of antique model cars still boxed, old coins, old cameras and an antique bicycle.

Seven years ago I financed the rehab of an old apartment complex that had been abandoned for the previous 10 years. The buyer used his own funds to purchase, we provided rehab $. Anyway, we knew squatters had been living there. He kicked the squatters out, and I went over there to see the mess. He had a crew of 4 cleaning out the fillth. Under all the broken furniture, old newspapers, clothes, etc. we found a dead body almost totally decomposed (the smell was pretty awful). Not valuable, but pretty unusual. Turned out the body was a murder victim missing for a while!

Don,
Did that turn the project into a crime scene and stop progress? If so, for how long?

Yes, a very cool thread. The most interesting thing I ever found was a calligraphy set. It's still around here some place. Under a pile of something. Or maybe out in the garage...???

Mostly garbage and dirty carpet. My tenants never leave any change.

I did get a really nice heavy long tow chain this year. The tenant missed it because it was buried in a full year's worth of weeds. I've been building fence all summer, so the tow chain has gotten a lot of use stretching fence wire.

I also got a long pry bar that looks like a gigantic screwdriver (don't know what it is called). Same thing; it had been dropped outside and buried in the weeds.

That thing is useful for all sorts of jobs. Just used it yesterday to get a broken mower head out of the riding lawnmower.

Mostly, my tenants take all their stuff and anything of mine they can pry up. I can never figure out why they take the hoses and sprinklers because they never water, so what do they need sprinklers for?

No real treasure yet, other than perhaps the house itself. Surprising that I haven't though, given my obsession with very old houses! The best so far was a small antique postcard collection (circa 1920) that I was able to sell to the current owners for $100. The big appeal was that you could see that very house in a few of the postcards! I had the postcards matted and framed and presented to the buyers at closing.

Speaking of corpses, a colleague of mine in Miami found a partial human skeleton buried in the backyard of an REO he picked up almost a year ago- discovered while replumbing the irrigation system. This was in Liberty City- not a very friendly place. Police claimed the body was unidentifiable.

I'm still waiting to find the bearer bonds, Diane!

I owned a duplex East of Houston TX about 25 years ago. After reading about an orgy the police broke up, (in the local community paper,) I went to investigate. I found that my rent money was spent on literally thousands of dollars in porn. Not Playboys or Hustlers. These books left nothing to the imagination and had $25 listed on the covers. $Twenty Five$ each!! I didn't count how many we found, But, it was at least 500. I couldn't re-coup my losses since my Dad was preaching in the area.
Also, the place was literally swarming with fleas. Everytime I saw someone with bug bites on them for a few weeks after, I wondered "were they at the orgy?"
Don

@ Edward Puckett. I owned a home inspection company for 17 years and during that time there was a pretty sensational murder trial in our town. The lady was missing for quite some time before her body was found.

They found it on a property we had inspected a short time before. And .. you guessed it, the seller was one of the murderers!