This happened to me and hit me hard!

[Jorge Vazquez]

I can’t count how many properties I’ve walked into and found pennies, nickels, quarters—even perfectly good items—just left behind. I’ve never understood why so many people struggling financially dismiss the pennies, while the wealthy count every single one. That’s how they stay wealthy. It hit me like a wall the day I was buying a serious property and realized the amount of cash just lying around. Small money habits matter more than most people think.

What’s the smallest “money find” you’ve had that stuck with you?  My best friend has been $15,000 worth of material and furniture!

[Jay Hinrichs]

Quote from @David Krulac:

I was just telling somebody else that we have accumulated about 20 hammers, left behind by tenants and former owners.  Tool boxes, other tools including power tools, garden tools were left behind.  Many of the properties that we bought were through Sheriff Sales and Taxes Sales, where the owners/tenants left involuntary or were deceased.  We've gotten multiple cars, none of which were running and were older used cars, nothing of any value and since we didn't have keys or titles ended up getting a salvage tower to come and get.  And since we didn't have titles, we didn't get any money just the towing was free.  We got a motorcycle once but it was missing a front wheel and we junked it.  Lots of metal junk went to the salvage yard for recycling, as well as paper, cans and bottles.  I one house we didn't get a dumpster, but put out 165 construction bags of trash, after donating clothes, furniture and household goods to local charities like Goodwill and Salvation Army. At one house I found an envelop under the carpet with about $100, I think that was the most cash I ever found after buying and selling over 1,000 properties.  Lots of furniture, at it looked like they left all the furniture and household goods including food.  It was an estate property and I did notice that there were gun magazines, but we never found any guns.  I presume that the family took all the guns and jewelry and left everything else.  We also bought some hoarder houses.  The first one was before I even heard the term "hoarder house". It was packed floor to ceiling with pathways that were two feet thick with trampled trash.  It took several 30 yard dumpsters to empty and there were no valuables recovered.  My business partner once bought a hoarder house and the only thing he kept was a long extension cord. Everything else was junk and trash. We bought a house that had a major fire and everything was left in the house, no valuables.  We also bought some flooded properties, no valuables found there either.  We've found lots of big items that are hard to move or heavy like refrigerators and other appliances, most were damaged, filthy and unusable and were taken to the scrap yards for the metal content.  We have found lots of pennies and loose coins; I think people are too lazy to pick them up and figure that pennies are worthless. 

Last big demo and new build I did right around teh corner from me here in Lake Oswego I took huge amount of dumpters 60k pounds of crap few RVs cars not running.. And one boa constrictor that got loose not sure what happened to it.. 32 dead cats in the house.. Needed Hazmat to go into it.. But demod it and built a new 3k sq foot home and sold it for 1.5 mil :)
these are the jewels we find in this business.
then the last one I did in the city of Portland same thing EXTREME hoarder you could smell the house from the sidewalk how poeple live like that I have no clue in the basement whoever lived there disassembled a chevy and put it back together .. I had to crane it out. However again we did a lot split and built 3 700k homes and the eye sore is just a memory now.