Anyone looking for a home in Snohomish County can easily find signs pointing to open houses.
These signs, however, often disappear from road sides, creating an expensive headache for real estate agents and developers.
Cathy Hartmann-Gladwell, a broker owner at Timberland Realty Group in Arlington, says that the theft of such sandwich board-style, or “A-board,” signs has been a challenge for many years.
“It’s very common to drive around and see A boards flipped inside and used for garage sales,” Hartmann-Gladwell said.
Hartmann-Gladwell recently lost five signs taken from one corner in a weekend. She never got them back. That cost can be high for agents who are in business for themselves. Depending on the size, A-board signs run from $80 to $150 apiece. Losing five such signs means that an agent could be out as much as $750.
“We rely heavily on signs to get people to new home sites,” Hartmann-Gladwell said. “It becomes just a nightmare for us to replace.”
Real estate agents’ search for missing signs often begins with the state Department of Transportation. DOT maintenance staffers pick up signs that are a hazard to motorists or are placed on the highway right of way.
No one is allowed to place signs in the public right of way along state highways, said Stephen Chick, DOT traffic central operations supervising engineer. County and city codes contain similar rules.
DOT staffers hold onto the A-board signs for a while if they can. Depending on where the signs are picked up and which transportation department facility has room, the signs get stored, in Chick’s words, in “real estate heaven.” Hartmann-Gladwell calls it the “sign graveyard.”
Chick said that there are thousands of corrugated plastic signs in areas where it’s illegal to put them.
“One person can go out and pick up several hundred in a day,” Chick said.
When owners pick up their signs, there is no charge, though Chick would like to see a fee imposed.
Developers and others hire sign companies such as Huntington Signs in Bothell to put out and retrieve their signs each weekend. Huntington Signs’ Forrest Hetland has been supplying and placing signs for real estate agents and developers for two years. Normally the developer supplies the signs and then with Hetland organizes where they need to be placed.
“It’s usually Saturday morning,” Hetland said. “Some are picked up and put out every day. Some are picked up on Sunday night.”
In King County, Hetland typically has to measure 42 feet from the dead center of a road to the sidewalk to know where his signs can legally be placed.
“Each road is different,” Hetland said. “Some have an 80-foot setback. Some 100 feet. A lot of time it’s impossible to follow some of the setbacks.”
But Hetland’s problems are similar to those of real estate agents. He has seen signs being taken for use as garage sales advertisements or just being dumped. Hetland believes that people trying to clean up their neighborhood should leave the signs alone.
Hetland said a couple from a volunteer group took signs three or four times, costing him 70 percent of his signs.
“It took us a month to figure out where the signs were,” Hetland said.
After filing three different police reports, Hetland purchased a tracking device and embedded it in a board. He tracked the signal and found the signs dumped in Renton.
The cost of the lost signs for one month was $3,500. The incident also cost Hetland thousands of dollars in potential business and made him lose one of his main clients, he said.
“It’s just like stealing,” Hetland said. “It adds up.”
Chick, from the Department of Transportation, wants to meet with real estate agents and developers to see what they can do to help each other. He agrees that it has been a tough year for home sellers.
“Had it been another year, it might have been up on my list,” Chick said of collecting real estate signs put in the wrong place. “I hope to get the word out to them to change their tactics.”
Pat O’Leary, highway advertising control program manager for DOT, has done some outreach work. He adds that keeping the roadsides clean is mandated by the state’s Scenic Vistas Act. “If you look it up it’s pretty clear why we are doing this,” O’Leary said.
Hartmann-Gladwell has her plate full with people taking the signs, the transportation department and various city regulations.
“It’s recently gotten worse because a lot of the cities have started to restrict the signage placement,” she said.
For the most part Hartmann-Gladwell has not retrieved signs from people who take them. By the time she finds them they are either written on or so damaged that it would be almost impossible to reuse them for her work.
“It’s not worth the confrontation,” she said.
She has found them in gullies and once as a sign advertising a birthday party location for a child.
“I’m not even sure why people think they are free,” Hartmann-Gladwell said. “That it’s just open to the public to take these signs.”
Christina Harper is a Snohomish County freelance writer. She can be reached at harper@heraldnet.com.
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