Cash for Keys.(real estate agent and marketing)

Leo Nordine turned the front-door key and cat-footed into one of his three hundred homes, a four-bedroom in South Gate. "Hello, Leo Nordine!" he announced himself. He walked into a living room stuffed with boxes and saw three girls huddled under a blanket, watching the Disney Channel. "Why aren't you in school?" he asked, smiling.

The oldest, Valerie, said, "Our mom said because we have to move, to stay home and not tell anyone."

"Is your mom around?"

Nordine sells foreclosed houses in Los Angeles, which makes him a busy man. In 2006, he sold seventy-five houses for the banks; in 2008, he sold two hundred and eighty-two. This year, despite foreclosure moratoriums declared by several huge banks, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by the state of California--and despite the federal government's seventy-five-billion-dollar plan to help troubled homeowners--he expects to sell a house a day.

The whole game is volume and speed: Nordine, forty-six, is one of L.A.'s leading R.E.O. brokers (bank-derived shorthand for "other real estate owned"), because he treats his properties--which he cleans up, watches over, and pays the utilities on--like hot potatoes. He has a knack for pricing houses aggressively, so they sell fast, a valuable skill in a county where experienced sellers say that values are declining two to three per cent a month. "I use Leo pretty much exclusively in L.A.," Graham Parish, a senior asset manager for AssetLink, which handles defaulted mortgages for Fidelity National Financial, says. "His average days on market is fifty, which is phenomenal--with other brokers it's about a hundred and twenty. On a five-hundred-thousand-dollar property, he's saving us twenty thousand."

While driving to the house in South Gate on a late-January morning, Nordine began examining his case file at a stoplight, and then through a left turn. Hunched up in his wife's Toyota Prius, forgoing a seat belt, he explained, "The owner, Alicia Gonzalez, bought the place in 2001 for one hundred and seventy thousand, and refi'd in 2006"--at the peak of the bubble. "She pulled out four hundred and forty thousand from New Century, which was already in deep doo-doo--terrible loans, specializing in people who didn't speak much English. We'll list it for two-ten." (The property later received multiple offers and went into escrow at $245,000.)

Having warned colleagues of the coming collapse as early as 2004, Nordine is not particularly sympathetic to banks and homeowners who collaborated on gimcrack loans in 2006, a folie a deux of suckers who expected real-estate values to rise forever. But in this case there was a complication: though the bank had foreclosed on Alicia Gonzalez in November, and sheriffs' deputies had locked her out a few days before Nordine's visit, in the interim she had rented part of the house to Valerie's unsuspecting mother and her family.