When banks reclaim homes, the process is supposed to be slow but predictable.

Instead, one real estate caretaker was pulled into a five-year saga involving a multimillion-dollar mansion in an HOA neighborhood and schemers who knew every trick in the book.

And the final moves proved far messier than anyone planned.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

I am entitled to keep this house. No, I don’t need to pay the mortgage. I have to leave? I am entitled to strip it bare.

Once upon a time, I was a property shepherd.

Banks would foreclose on properties and assign our real estate office to nurse the houses through the pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, eviction, and post-eviction periods.

Banks liked using realtors because we would essentially work for free. I did a lot of work, and our only payment was if we sold the property at the end and got a commission.

The property shepherd described their newest assignment.

No sale? The banks got a ton of free labor.

There was a particular mansion. 8,000 square feet. Membership rights to a private golf course.

In a good market, it should be worth around $3,000,000, but during the foreclosure years it was just under $1,000,000.

The property was added to my list of around 900 assets at the time.

They felt motivated to do a good job with this one, and thought it would be a straightforward task.

Just another house, but a pretty good commission as a reward for taking so many of the not-worth-as-much houses.

The house was occupied.

This particular one was well into the eviction phase, so I expected to have possession within a month. Easy peasy.

But soon, they were proved wrong.

Except what should have been a quick assignment turned into five long years.

For five years, I did weekly occupancy checks on that house.

I’d drive by, take pictures documenting the condition, make sure it was occupied and maintained, and keep an eye out for code violations.

I also kept an eye out for HOA liens.

Occasionally, I delivered messages to the bank offering checks of up to $25,000 if they would waive eviction and just turn the house over to the bank through me.

But the previous homeowners were determined to fight back at every turn.

Nope. It was their house. They were entitled to it.

Nobody could make them leave, and their lawyer was making sure they didn’t have to pay a dime for insurance, property taxes, or water and sewer.

The bank had to pay water and sewer and the property taxes so they didn’t lose the house to the city.

The bank also had to assume the full insurance risk because the occupants weren’t paying.

I asked my legal contact how this was dragging on for so long and received an answer that it was technical.

It turns out, the previous homeowners had latched on to several legal loopholes.

Basically, the guy filed for bankruptcy, which automatically stays the eviction, and that takes a couple of months to work through the system.

It would be discharged, so the eviction was back on, but then his wife would file for bankruptcy, with him not being allowed to file again until some waiting period.

After her bankruptcy was discharged, he would file again.

They went through a few cycles of this, but I was just the real estate guy and didn’t have a full picture of what was going on on the legal side.

The previous homeowners were able to evade eviction for quite some time.

A couple of times, I was told that an eviction was scheduled and to stand by with my locksmith and trash-out crew.

But each time, they got a stay of eviction somehow, so it was canceled.

But one day, that changed.

One day, their luck ran out.

I was told to get over there and, as per standard procedure, the moment the bailiff told me he was done, secure the house.

I arrived.

There was about $200,000 worth of personal property already out on the lawn.

I was ready to go.

But then, their lawyer struck again.

But then their lawyer came running up with a writ from the judge.

The eviction was canceled. Immediately.

The bailiff collected his crew and drove away, and I watched the occupants start to move their property, slightly damp from the drizzle, back into the house.

Now comes the part where their entitlement satisfactorily bites them hard.

Yet another eviction date was scheduled.

Me, doing my weekly occupancy checks, saw no sign of packing up or preparing to leave.

They fully expected their legal tricks to work yet again.

Once again, their luck ran out.

But this time, they didn’t.

The bank’s lawyer told me the eviction was 100% definitely on.

The moves that worked before were not in play this time around, so it was a firm and definite date.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

But then one day, the property shepherd noticed something odd.

I did my weekly occupancy check on a Thursday and noticed that there were a lot of people going in and out of the house.

There was also a large garage sale sign in the yard, open to the public.

Well, I’m the public, so I went in to take a preliminary glimpse of the house to give me an idea of how many bathrooms and other sinks would need to be winterized.

The property shepherd could hardly believe what he saw.

I was met with price tags on everything.

I mean everything.

Every sink, toilet, bidet, light fixture, granite and marble countertop, oak and mahogany cabinet, pedestal sink, bathroom sink with marble tops and underlighting.

Even the solid oak doors on every bedroom and closet had price tags.

Some fixtures were already gone.

This is a 100% absolute no.

Those fixtures belong to the bank, no question.

The previous homeowners were trying to steal back almost everything they could.

They felt they were entitled to strip all 8,000 square feet as much as they could to get whatever cash they could.

They were about to do hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to the house.

So when the property shepherd got the law involved, things got even messier.

I called the cops.

I explained that there was an impending eviction and the occupants were stripping the house.

Fortunately, I was in a city where they cared, because a squad car rolled up in just a few minutes.

The officer told the owner that this was not allowed, the sale was over, and he had to stop stripping the house.

The previous homeowners feigned ignorance, but the property shepherd wasn’t buying it.

The former borrower swore that he had no idea it wasn’t allowed and promised to stop.

I didn’t trust him.

So the next day, I felt the house needed an extra weekly check.

The previous homeowners were still at it.

The sign was still up, and people were still going in and out of the house.

I called the cops immediately, and they were out again within a few minutes.

This time, the cops weren’t as nice.

This time, the officer was angry.

He ordered everybody out except the owner and his family.

The officer let me look around, and I spotted several items missing—about $15,000 worth that I immediately identified.

The officer said the ignorance excuse didn’t work because he had been told the day before.

If there was anything else missing at the time of eviction, he was going to jail.

Monday morning came. Time for the eviction.

Eager to get this case out of the way, the bank urged more leniency.

The house was empty of all personal property and missing a few of the fixtures.

The bank, happy to be rid of him and not in the mood for yet another legal battle, told me to just forget about it.

They asked me to inventory what was missing as best as I could and proceed as normal.

The bids to make the house livable came in at around $100,000, but the bank didn’t want to bother.

Finally, an official sale was made and the nightmare was over.

They sold the house for cash, as-is, for $1,000,000 within two to three days of it being listed.

With the repairs, it probably would have gone for $1.2 million, so it wasn’t really worth the time or effort.

What a saga.

Redditors chime in with their thoughts.

This appears to be quite the lucrative scheme.

This commenter isn’t surprised in the least that someone would do something like this.

Entitlement gives people crazy amounts of misplaced confidence.

When a house is too cheap, sometimes there’s a reason.

These schemers dragged it out for years, but the clock eventually ran out.

In the end, entitlement cost more than it ever saved.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.