First-time Homebuyers’ Find Attic Full Of Cat Feces, Bones In Chicago Bungalow

A couple who bought their first home in 2023 on the Northwest Side and soon discovered a "putrid" odor is suing the seller, their inspector and their real estate agent after finding voluminous amounts of cat feces and urine in an unfinished attic.

The Albany Park brick bungalow was home to a 66-year-old childless widower. His decomposing body was discovered Aug. 10, 2021, amid what the medical examiner called a “hoarder environment.” More than 40 cats had been living with him in the badly cluttered one-story home, and the cats apparently used a large hole in the ceiling above the dining room to access the attic and its insulation, which became their litter box.

Jeffrey Martini, 38, and Ryan Trent Oldham, 37, didn't know that history when they toured the $350,000 home at 5015 N. Keeler Ave., owned by Grandview Capital and marketed by Grandview Realty.

The walls were freshly painted. There was new carpeting in the bedrooms, and the house smelled strongly of air fresheners, they say.

“It just looked like there was so much potential,” Oldham says. “It was right in the neighborhood that we wanted to be in.”

No one mentioned the mess lurking in the unfinished attic, accessible only through a hatch directly above the basement stairwell.

“Our opinion is that they took advantage of us as first-time homebuyers,” Martini says.

The couple filed a civil lawsuit in June in Cook County Circuit Court against Grandview Capital, Grandview Realty and managing broker Christopher Lobrillo; Pinnacle Property Inspection Services and its inspector Russ Valleyfield; and their real estate agent Kyle Bordner with Compass Realty Group.

The lawsuit says Grandview “did the bare minimum and just enough of a ‘fix up’ to fool the plaintiffs into buying the home.”

The lawsuit says their inspector stuck his head through the attic door but missed the piles of feces and air fresheners that were later discovered up there.

Oldham says their real estate agent failed to look out for them, an allegation the agent denies in a court filing.

He told the Sun-Times that he was at the property with their agent before the sale when a neighbor mentioned “the house had a lot of cats in it."

“My realtor said, ‘That’s good to know. ... But they rehabbed it.’ And [the neighbor] said, ‘Not really,’” Oldham says.

The conversation gave him pause, but the inspection report and the agent’s seeming lack of concern made him confident in their decision to buy the house.

The lawsuit seeks to undo the purchase or get reimbursed “for the significant losses incurred just to bring the disgusting home into a habitable condition.”

Grandview Capital shares a business address in St. Charles with Grandview Homes, which advertises widely in the Chicago area that it buys “difficult to sell homes.” Grandview Homes is not named in the lawsuit.

In legal filings, the defendants have denied liability. Representatives for Grandview, Pinnacle and Compass declined interview requests.

The couple now says they’re fighting to keep their lawsuit alive after their attorney, who had been working for free, withdrew from the case this month. They say they’ve already spent thousands of dollars in futile attempts to make the cat smell go away.

A surprise on closing day

Grandview is described as a “professional house-flipper” in the lawsuit, which says that the company “did the bare minimum” of work to “hide the numerous defects in the home.” It bought the Albany Park house for $205,000 in May 2022.

Martini and Oldham closed on their purchase on June 30, 2023, a hot and humid day after a night of thunderstorms. They entered their new home and were immediately hit with a pungent odor.

“It just smelled like overwhelming uric acid stench,” Martini says.

Their friends, Kara Richard and Mat Biscan, arrived with a bottle of champagne to welcome them to the neighborhood. Richard, who was pregnant, says she walked in and almost gagged.

“It made me feel sick to my stomach,” Richard says. “It was just like, ‘Oh my god.’ But then we went down into the basement, and that's where we discovered a bone.”

On the basement floor, next to what appeared to be pieces of cat fur, was a small bone. “A shoulder blade,” Martini says.

Over the next few weeks, more horrors appeared — a cat spinal cord found in an air duct and a cat skull found in the wall of the bathroom during a remodel. There was also the horrible smell, like a litter box, especially on very hot days after rain.

They hired a contractor to look into the attic, thinking maybe that was the source of the stench.

Richard, who was visiting, says she won’t forget what the contractor said. “He came down and verbatim said, ‘There’s nothing but turds up there!’”

Martini says the contractor found “every single place in the entire attic was covered” with cat feces and soiled insulation.

Their elation at buying their first house turned to panic.

“It's horrible. It just was taken away so quickly,” Oldham says.

As the couple continued to investigate, they found news stories from 2021 about animal rescuers finding more than 40 cats in the house amid fears that more were trapped inside.

The owner who died was found during a well-being visit by police and firefighters after a neighbor noticed the owner hadn’t moved his silver Chevrolet Impala for a week and mail was piling up on the front porch, according to a Cook County medical examiner’s report.

After his decomposing body was removed, people from a cat rescue group brought out the dozens of surviving cats, according to a GoFundMe campaign at the time.

Martini and Oldham obtained a video the cat rescuers recorded. It showed clutter piled high on furniture throughout the house, and there was a gaping hole in the dining room ceiling giving cats easy access to the attic.

They say Grandview appeared to have patched the hole and painted over it. New carpeting was installed, but the subfloors were left intact. Automatic air fresheners were also installed, including at the front door.

The seller’s disclosure form, required by Illinois law, shows Grandview marked “no” next to all of the questions about material defects in the home.

Scott G. Richmond, attorney for Grandview and Lobrillo, declined an interview request, but said in an email that “in 15 years of being in business and selling thousands of homes to Chicagoland home buyers, Grandview has only had two lawsuits filed against it related to claims pertaining to the homes it sells, including this one. The other one was settled by agreement without any finding of liability.”

Regarding the cat bones, he wrote that they were “found in the basement ceiling, which Grandview was not aware of during the time it owned the home or it would have been removed.”

In a court filing, Grandview argued it was unfair for Martini and Oldham to wait almost a year before complaining.

“Defendants were not advised of any problems pertaining to cat feces, cat urine, walls and ceilings caving in, dead cat carcasses, carpeting and wood flooring damaged by cat urine and feces or any other issues by Plaintiffs prior to the demand from Plaintiffs’ attorneys in June 2024,” the filing said.

Martini and Oldham spent $20,000 to have workers clean the attic and replace portions of the ceiling, which was on top of previous expenses to address the odor.

The work helped, but they say the cat urine odor is still embedded in the walls and subflooring, as well as the attic beams.

“There are parts of this house that cannot be replaced that are soaked in urine,” Martini says.

Neighbor Nancy Everett says the house had been notorious for its smell that “would burn your nostrils.” She and other neighbors lodged complaints with the city multiple times to no avail.

“Frankly, I wanted the house torn down,” Everett says.

Biscan says he feels terrible for his friends.

“They came to us for advice: ‘Should we spend our money on a house?’ And we were like, ‘Absolutely, it's the best decision you could make,’" Biscan says. "And of course, it's the one situation where it's not a great decision.”