Working in abandoned and foreclosed houses can be a dirty job. A real dirty one, depending on the hygiene or hoarding habits of former residents.
It’s not a vocation for everyone. A strong stomach and equally strong sense of humor can come in handy.
But Corey Heider, 38, of Monroeville, is not only making the best of it, he’s parlaying it into a fast-growing social media following and an upcoming appearance on one of the most popular comedy podcasts.
“Yo, this place is just straight squalor, cousin,” Heider says while narrating one of many videos that has regularly racked up hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook.
The videos vary in length, but the plot is consistent: Heider keeps a stiff upper lip, a strong gag reflex and an even stronger sense of humor as he goes on a quick tour of the house and comments on items left behind. It could be nostalgic memorabilia like a stuffed Alf doll or a cat painting that catches his eye.
Or it could be a horrifying nightmare like an entire upstairs filled with jars, cups and other assorted receptacles, all containing human urine.
“If you look here, you can see the centralized (urine) bucket,” he says in that video. “And then if you take a look over there at the toilet? Never been used.”
In the first video he posted on Facebook, which currently sits at 2.2 million views, there are simply deviled egg trays. Everywhere. Of every kind. In every available space.
“My man got deviled egg trays for deviled egg days,” Heider says.
The videos have gotten attention far beyond the Pittsburgh region: In late March, Heider is flying to Austin, TX, to be a guest on an episode of Matt & Shane’s Secret Podcast with comedians Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker.
Below, watch a highlight reel from some of Heider’s videos.
Cleaning up
Heider works for Pennsylvania Property Maintenance, based in New Alexandria. The company’s crews are dispatched to houses anywhere within about a four-hour radius of Pittsburgh. On Feb. 23, Heider and a coworker were at a White Oak house slated for a sheriff’s sale. Heider was making his way around the outside, seeking out any cracks in the basement cinder blocks.
“The bank that owns the house contracts with a company, and that company contracts with us,” Heider said. “Our goal is just to get the property ready for market. We’ll put on handrails if they’re missing and do whatever other work that needs done to get the house up to code, and to keep it from deteriorating more.”
Heider said about two-thirds of the houses he works on could be considered a risk to the public, especially if they’re not properly secured.
“In some houses, we’ve found trash piled three feet high,” he said. “Once it gets to that level, the trash at the bottom starts getting wet and decomposing. Sometimes at the bottom of those piles, the biodegradable stuff is fully decomposing back into dirt.”
In other cases, Heider has to worry about whether someone has been squatting in an abandoned property.
“There’s been houses where drug users will stick the needles in the wall and break them off, instead of throwing it on the floor,” he said. “But then you get these ‘porcupine walls,’ where basically if you touch them, you have to go get tested for hepatitis or who knows what?”
Heider said he once encountered a squatter who’d barricaded the door to a home he’d been assigned to work on.
“Then he figured out which window we were using to get back inside, and he put a bunch of sharp metal and broken glass on the couch right below it,” he said. “He tried to ‘Home Alone’ me.”
A comedic side hustle
Occasional hazards aside, Heider’s initial videos of the funny or ridiculous situations he encountered — mostly involving hoarding or trash — were simply being sent to friends on the Snapchat app.
“I have to give credit to my buddy Vinny, who I was sending the Snapchats to,” Heider said. “He told me, ‘Every day you find something hilarious. Do me a favor. Post one of these videos on Instagram every day for a month, and just see what happens.’”
He gave it a try and around the 30-day mark, Heider noticed that one video he posted — where he discovered a 1970s-era bathroom with shag-carpeted, brown-stained walls — was racking up a lot of views. He decided to start posting the videos to Facebook.
Today, the carpet-walls video sits at 18 million views on Facebook Reels. A video titled “Pall Mall Walls” showing the white outline of old picture frames on walls stained brown with decades of nicotine and cigarette smoke has 14 million views.
It wasn’t long before Heider received a message from Facebook, asking if he wanted to monetize the “Blue Collar Corey” page. Since then, it’s become a fairly lucrative side hustle. Heider declined to disclose how much he makes from social-media monetization.
“If I had to rely on it for money, it wouldn’t be enough to live on,” he said. “But the fact that it’s grown mostly organically, and then Facebook reached out to partner up and monetize it? That’s made it worth it.”
That growth — nearly 215,000 followers on his “Blue Collar Corey” Facebook page and another 242,000 on Instagram — has a lot to do with Heider’s narration in the videos. It’s not just the humor: Within five seconds of listening, you can tell he’s homegrown Western Pennsylvania, a Johnstown native who now lives in Monroeville.
Show-runners on HBO’s “The Pitt” toyed with a “Yinzer” accent on a recent episode, to mixed results. They could’ve just had the actors listen to Heider’s videos. He said the novelty of the dialect has probably been a factor in gaining him attention beyond the region.
“A lot of people do seem to enjoy the Western Pennsylvania accent,” he said.
In a video visiting what he said was an extremely hastily-renovated AirBNB in McKeesport, Heider zooms in on paint flecks and drips all over the floor.
“Not a drop cloth in sight, any day they were painting,” he says with a laugh, before panning up to a jagged, crooked wall corner. “Every edge just looks like Ray Charles had his way with it with a hatchet, cousin.”
Those quotes are cleaned up a little. Heider is free with his language, and the rough edges give his videos the feel of just hanging out with a friend and cracking jokes.
Sometimes he finds interesting things worth keeping, like a set of trading cards featuring military figures from World War II and the first Persian Gulf War (“We got a first-edition Colin Powell and Dick Cheney!”), or a collection of old Zippo lighters. Or a sculpture of a shirtless clown putting another clown in the “Boston Crab” wrestling hold.
“What is actually happening? Bro, what crossover did I miss?” Heider asks in the video.
Other times he finds true horrors. One video was shot after an attempt to pull out some old ceiling insulation results in the discovery of a dead, barely identifiable animal.
“Your boy was just attacked by something that had been deceased for a while,” he states, very matter-of-factly, in the video.
Some videos are just a bizarre situation he finds himself in, like a rental truck whose windshield wipers are not attached to their controls.
“We out here with this truck that’s got the flappiest, slappiest windshield wipers,” he says with a laugh. “But we got some twine from Dollar General and we’re about to make this (truck) gangster again!”
Mostly, he finds a lot of mold and overdue maintenance.
“We just try to keep up with what the house definitely needs,” he said while taking a break at the White Oak house. “My buddy’s inside right now dry-locking the walls, and the first thing I did was opened the attic up and scrubbed down the rafters.”
Eventually, the house will get a new owner through the sheriff’s sale, and thanks to Heider it hopefully won’t have developed any new cracks or leaks.
And somewhere, out in the wilds of the internet, will be the video Heider shot of a bunch of semi-creepy-looking dolls and other kitschy items in a large glass display case.
“We got some top-tier grandma-core here, dawg,” he says in the video, before snatching up a ceramic egg with a unicorn design from the bottom shelf. “Yo, I’m taking this home and hatching my very own grandma unicorn.”
Find Heider’s videos online by searching “Blue collar corey” on Facebook or “heidercorey” on Instagram.