{"id":5409,"date":"2015-11-20T07:31:24","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T02:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/news\/2015\/11\/20\/a-boom-in-used-furniture\/"},"modified":"2015-11-20T07:31:24","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T02:01:24","slug":"a-boom-in-used-furniture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/a-boom-in-used-furniture\/","title":{"rendered":"A boom in used furniture"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Al Lewis
\n<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/a>Dow Jones Newswires<\/em><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

People used to sit at these desks and make liar loans. Now, they’re on sale for $299 at Office Liquidators in Lakewood.<\/p>\n

The first of three truckloads arrived Monday: cherry laminate desks with matching lateral file cabinets and Herman Miller Aeron office chairs.<\/p>\n


\n
\nOffice Liquidators’ founder, Dennis Meyer, said he bought them from IndyMac Bancorp Inc.’s offices in Overland Park, Kan. He hopes to buy more from IndyMac’s digs in Arizona and California, too.<\/p>\n

Regulators seized IndyMac in July. It was history’s second-largest bank failure, behind the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Now you can sit in the same ergonomic style as those wacky IndyMackies who seemed comfortable making loans to just about anyone.<\/p>\n

IndyMac probably paid about $950 apiece for these mesh-backed chairs when they were new. Office Liquidators will sell them for $499.<\/p>\n

IndyMac, for all its folly, has practically been forgotten in a wave of collapses, emergency mergers and bailouts involving Bear Stearns Cos., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Wachovia Corp. and Washington Mutual Inc.<\/p>\n

All of these companies have office furniture, and Meyer wants to sell it.<\/p>\n

“Almost every bank you just mentioned, we’ve already talked to,” he said.<\/p>\n

Meyer, 53, practiced corporate law for three years, until 1985, when he bought a hangar full of used furniture from a bankrupt airline. He made more money in three weeks than he did in a year as an attorney. So he’s been liquidating office furniture ever since.<\/p>\n

Over the years, he has picked through the wreckage of every sort of corporate implosion: oil companies, telecom giants, homebuilders, banks, airlines and tech startups.<\/p>\n

Meyer said his sales have been in the doldrums with the economy since spring, but the worse things get, the better \u00e2\u20ac\u201d at least in the long run.<\/p>\n

“Office furniture is an easy thing to postpone,” he explained.<\/p>\n

But the availability of fancy banker furniture is starting to attract customers.<\/p>\n

“Banks and mortgage companies, in general, buy better furniture,” Meyer said. “So we’re seeing different buyers now.”<\/p>\n

In addition to big corporations that might survive the economic horrors, Meyer is getting calls from law firms.<\/p>\n

Every bust is a boom for the bankruptcy lawyers.<\/p>\n

The bankruptcy process, however, often bogs down the task of bringing idled furniture to market. It took Meyer nearly five years to get Enron’s stuff after its 2001 collapse.<\/p>\n

He said he walked through 30 floors of Enron’s Houston headquarters, including the 50th floor, where Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling officed.<\/p>\n

Meyer didn’t get Lay’s or Skilling’s pieces. But in 2013, he stocked his store with granite-top desks, Italian leather chairs and cherry filing cabinets from other Enron floors.<\/p>\n

One company that bought Enron furniture has since gone out of business itself. The granite table it purchased is back on Office Liquidators’ sales floor. I caressed its cold stone surface, wondering what lies had flown across it.<\/p>\n

Was this table cursed? Is that why it came back?<\/p>\n

No, said Meyer. It’s just how business goes.<\/p>\n

“This happens all the time. We’ve sold the same furniture, over and over, five to 10 times, over the last 23 years.”<\/p>\n

Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Taken from http:\/\/www.denverpost.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Al Lewis Dow Jones Newswires People used to sit at these desks and make liar loans. Now, they’re on sale for $299 at Office Liquidators in Lakewood. The first of three truckloads arrived Monday: cherry laminate desks with matching lateral file cabinets and Herman Miller Aeron office chairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-indonesia-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}