The current foreclosure crisis has meant more work for a Fair Haven-based sign-making family — which sometimes needs doggie treats or a call to the cops to finish the job.
Chuck Lafo (pictured) and his dad’s family have been running the American Sign Company on Ferry Street just north of Lombard for 25 years. They are one of the go-to firms for lawyers appointed by the court to conduct foreclosure sales, because signs, by law, must be placed on the property about a month before the actual foreclosure sale.
The family’s not making a killing on the crisis, but business is up. So are confrontations with angry homeowners and the occasional canine.
American Sign creates blanks from corrugated plastic with much of the boilerplate, Then the company adds specific information such as the lawyer’s name, andthe amount of the certified check one must have in hand to bid on a foreclosed property.
During a recent visit, Chuck Lafo was fabricating nine signs for an upcoming round of weekend foreclosures — two for New Haven, one on Ella Grasso Boulevard and another for Nash Street; and one each for locations in East Haven, West Haven, Milford, North Branford, and three for Meriden.
Foreclosures jumped 80 percent in New Haven last year; a similar increase is expected this year, with local officials racing to respond. With a likely sense of future business, Tony Lafo said American Sign produces about 200 corrugated blanks at a time. However the business has its own logic, sometimes flat, sometimes with significant upticks. “We can make eight foreclosure signs next week, or 25. There’s not this wave after wave of foreclosure sign business here that you’d think based on the news.”
On the other hand, Lafo did say in general the foreclosure sign aspect of the business has jumped perhaps 30 percent in the last year.
Still that represents growth from maybe 3 percent to perhaps 5 percent of the company’s total business.
Why?
“Would you believe that out of this little office,” he said, proudly showing a reporter the spacious rooms for routing, cutting, painting, and fabricating that back from the storefront on Ferry towards Erector Square, “that we handle the sign requirements in the New England territory signs for many national retail chains?”
Among them are Marshalls, TJMax, All State, and some 15 McDonaldses in the Greater New Haven area. “75 to 80 percent of our business is out of town.”
The foreclosure sign business, by contrast, is pretty much contained within greater New Haven. Lafo estimates that there are 2,000 to 3,000 lawyers in his database with whom he has dealt. Over 30 years American Sign has done tens of thousands of foreclosure signs.
Chuck Lafo said he enjoys the manual labor of the craft.
Both Lafos said that signs almost immediately get torn down by shocked, angry, upset owners or tenants. In such cases, the signmakers call the lawyers, the lawyers consult the court, and if the sign is ordered to be replaced, it’s done so. Once Chuck Lafo put the same sign back up on a Howe Street property, he said, every Friday for three months.
In most instances, however, the sign lasts just days, sometimes hours, and is not replaced, as long as the evidentiary photo is taken.
“Once,” said Chuck Lafo, “when I was taking a picture of the sign for the court, I caught in the photo quite literally the hands of someone living in the building ripping the sign down.”
Hence the line at the bottom of the signs: “Do not remove, violation subject to punishment.”
But upset owners or renters don’t seem too interested in heeding the warning.
The elder Lafo said once he delivered the foreclosure sign to a house and the man begged him not to deliver it, because his wife didn’t know about their troubles. “So I went around back to meet him so he could deal with it that way. But the wife came out, and once she saw what was going on, she tackled him, and they were going at it, fighting away. We’ve had knives drawn on us, and guns pointed, and then of course we don’t set the signs down. We call the cops.”
Chuck Lafo said he frequently carries dog treats and a ball, or sometimes brings his own canine, if there’s a dog, angry as its owner, when the foreclosure sign man approaches.
The Lafos charge almost always $225 for each sign, which includes fabrication, poles or away to attach the sign, tax, delivery, and photographing the sign in place so the lawyer can prove to the court that he fulfilled that part of his job. “New Haven’s court,” said the elder Lafo, “more or less indicates that $350 is the max, but we never charge that much.”
A clerk at the New Haven Superior Court confirmed that most of the sign company fees are in the $150 to 250 range. The clerk said there is no legal, laid-down price, but the yard stick is “what is reasonable for our area. In my experience,” said the clerk, who did not wish to be identified, “the prices charged are reasonable, and we almost never question them. The rates charged for advertising in the newspaper, that’s something else! And I can tell you some members of the bench are reviewing that!”
Fees to sign-makers, as well as to newspapers that print the notice of sales, can be fronted by the lawyers (who are repaid by the buyer of the foreclosed property), or by the buyer himself, but that takes a while.
A call to the Yuris Signs of Wallingford revealed that the company charges in the area of $190 to $250 per sign. Attorney Jerome Pagter, who supervised a recent foreclosure of a building bought by Archie Moore’s, said the sign he ordered came from a company called Fontanella’s in Meriden, and the price was $350.
Tony Lafo said that over the years family members have explored expanding their services to other counties in Connecticut, but the prices in places like Bridgeport, were generally lower than in New Haven. Hartford County, he said, had a maximum price of $175.
The American Sign Company, which has been in Fair Haven for 34 years, currently has about 18 employees, although it can shoot up to 30 depending on business. Tony Lafo said that despite prostitutes who work the blocks of Ferry Street in front of his shop, and the several bullet holes in the former sign, now replaced with this spiffy plinth, he’s upbeat about the city.
Yet the cyclical nature of things — and what continues to happen in his back yard — is making him cautious as well.
“You know, a sign is almost entirely recyclable — the metal, the neon, the ballast. So we place the stuff out in the yard in different bins that by law we recycle. But the scrap metal is almost always stolen, sometimes right during the day, sometimes literally right while we’re eating lunch. It’s tough out there.”
Inside, the foreclosure signs at American Sign Company, americansigninc.com, keep rolling off the press.
Previous Independent coverage of New Haven’s foreclosure crisis:
‚Ä¢ Foreclosure Sale Benefits Archie Moore’s
• Rescue Squad Swings Into Action
• A Bidder Shows Up
‚Ä¢ Bank Beats Tanya’s Bid
• Westville Auction Draws A Crowd
• DeStefano: Foreclosure Plan Ready
• Can They Help?
‚Ä¢ “We Should Over-Regulate These Bastards”
• Rosa Hears of Rescues
• WPCA Grilled on Foreclosures
‚Ä¢ WPCA’s Targets Struggle To Dig Out
• Sue The Subprimers?
• WPCA Hearing Delayed
‚Ä¢ Megna’s “Blood Boils” at WPCA Tactics
• Goldfield Wants WPCA Answers
• 2 Days, 8 Foreclosure Suits
• WPCA Goes On Foreclosure Binge
• A Guru Weighs In
• WPCA Targets Church
• Subprime Mess Targeted
‚Ä¢ Renters Caught In Foreclosure King’s Fall
‚Ä¢ She’s One Of 1,150 In The Foreclosure Mill
‚Ä¢ Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire
‚Ä¢“I’m Not Going To Lay Down And Let Them Take My House”
The following links are to various materials and brochures designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
How to prepare a complaint to the Department of Banking; Department of Banking Online Assistance Form; Connecticut Department of Banking, Avoiding Foreclosure; FDIC Consumer News; Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, Inc; Connecticut Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service.
For lawyer referral services in New Haven, call 562-5750 or visit this website. For the Department of Social Services (DSS) Eviction Foreclosure Prevention Program (EFPP), call 211 to see which community-based organization in the state serves your town.
Click here for information on foreclosure prevention efforts from Empower New Haven.