Willow and Hearth

A real estate investor who posts as @romankatzre on Instagram shared handheld footage of a confrontation most flippers dread: showing up to a property mid-renovation and finding it occupied by people who were never supposed to be there. His caption — “What a mess….” alongside #landlord, #squatter, #flip, #emptyhouse and #realtor — confirms the basic shape of the story, a squatter situation inside a vacant flip, even though the specific price tag attached to the property in some retellings of this clip is the investor’s own claim rather than something stated outright in the post itself.

The video shows the investor walking through rooms that were presumably mid-renovation, narrating what he’s finding as he goes — belongings that aren’t his, signs of someone cooking and sleeping in a house that was supposed to be sitting empty between permits and contractor visits, and the unmistakable sense that whoever moved in had settled in for the long haul rather than just passing through for a night. That kind of confrontation footage, raw and unedited, is exactly what makes this kind of post spread: there’s real tension in watching someone discover that strangers have quietly taken over a property they thought was secure.

Squatting in vacant flip and foreclosure properties is a genuine and growing headache for investors, and it’s easy to see why once you look at how these houses typically sit. A property mid-flip is often unoccupied for weeks or months at a stretch, sits dark at night, may have had utilities temporarily shut off, and sees contractors coming and going on an irregular schedule — all of which makes it easy for an empty house to go unnoticed by neighbors for longer than a normal vacant home would. Foreclosure and flip properties nationally are considered higher-risk for exactly this reason, and real estate investment groups have flagged squatting as an increasingly common cost of doing business in markets with a lot of distressed or renovation-stage inventory.

The legal reality makes the situation even more frustrating for owners. In most states, removing a squatter is not as simple as calling the police and having them escorted out on the spot, especially once someone has been inside long enough to claim they’re a tenant or to produce some kind of paperwork, real or fabricated. Many jurisdictions require the property owner to go through a formal eviction-style legal process once an occupant asserts any claim to residency, which can take weeks, and police are frequently reluctant to intervene directly in what they treat as a civil property dispute rather than a straightforward trespassing call. That’s part of why a growing number of states have passed or strengthened laws in recent years specifically aimed at letting owners remove squatters faster, with clearer criteria for law enforcement to act without forcing the owner through a full court proceeding.

Beyond the legal headache, there’s a real financial one. Every day a flip sits occupied by squatters is a day the renovation schedule, financing timeline, and resale plan all slide backward, on top of whatever cleanup and repair costs come from however the occupants left the place. Investors who’ve dealt with this before often describe rekeying locks, installing cameras, and doing far more frequent drive-by checks on vacant properties as basic cost-of-business steps now, rather than something only paranoid owners bother with.

Clips like this one resonate with anyone who’s ever worried about leaving a property unattended, but they land especially hard with the flipping and landlord community, who recognize the exact mix of disbelief and anger on camera. It’s a reminder that a vacant house, even one mid-renovation with contractors technically still assigned to it, isn’t automatically safe from someone deciding to move in without asking.