April 1st, 2013
HWC is actively seeking property inspectors throughout southern Texas.  Interested contractors should contact MHotard@HWCPP.com for details.  Contractors must carry general liability insurance.

March 25th, 2013

Jerry Klein, a seasoned veteran of the property preservation and inspection business, has joined HWC Property Preservation as its Director of Field Services.  Since 2010, Jerry served as Project Manager with Cityside Management where he was responsible for the operations of HUD Field Service Contracts covering eleven states.  Prior to that, Mr. Klein was the National Operations Manager of a large inspection firm where he managed 32 states.  He was also responsible for overseeing preservation and maintenance work for Freddie Mac in three states.

Jerry will assist HWC with its current expansion activities and will support future development of business beyond Louisiana and Texas.

HWC Property Preservation has been awarded an inspection contract spanning Southern Texas.  Work is expected to commence May 1st, 2013.  Since its inception in 2009 HWC expanded throughout Southern Louisiana.  Aside from this new contract, HWC is exploring opportunities elsewhere throughout the southeast United States.  HWC specializes in property preservation, inspections, renovations, rehabs,  securing, clean-outs, and nuisance animal control.

February 5th, 2013

With the explosion of rental property investments, HWC has geared up for rehab opportunities and the ever increasing demand for skilled renovation contractors.  Projects underway are currently located in Jefferson and St. Charles Parishes in Louisiana. 

Mike Hotard has been inundated with bid requests and there is no sign of the activity letting up.  “It seems that we can’t do a job without being approached at the site by someone needing our services.  Our field visibility and quality make for great advertising,” said Hotard. 

HWC Property Preservation is a trade name of Hotard Wildlife Control and Property Preservation, LLC.  It was originally founded in 2009 as a licensed nuisance animal control company and quickly evolved primarily into a Property Preservation firm due to the enormous demand for Field Services.

Hotard Wildlife Control and Property Preservation, LLC, dba: HWC Property Preservation has recently expanded its business and has begun work with Vanderbilt Mortgage.  The scope of work with Vanderbilt includes the rehab of foreclosed mobile homes throughout Southern Louisiana.  HWC has experienced unprecedented growth in recent months and finds itself sought after by countless national field service providers. 

Since opening its doors in 2009, HWC has grown from a tiny one person company to its current size operating multiple crews handling construction rehab, property preservation, lawn care, and of course, nuisance animal control.  According to Mike Hotard, the demand is at an all-time high and his success is driven by his demand for quality and close follow up on all of his jobs.

The dog had been in the nutria tunnel for about 10 minutes when a muffled bark was heard above ground on the banks of Bayou St. John.

"The dog's searching around, trying to find him," explained Mike Hotard of Hotard Wildlife Control, the trapping company that on Tuesday afternoon supervised the first formal dog-led nutria hunt at Bayou St. John.

An alarmed whine, presumably from the nutria, followed.

Mike Hotard, of Hotard Wildlife Control holds his terrier mix Cybil after she successfully tracked a nutria through a burrowed hole through the banks of Bayou St. John, Tuesday, March 16, 2010. Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune

For the next half-hour, the subterranean chase would continue as the trappers fulfilled the first of a three-hunt contract, financed by the Bayou St. John Neighborhood Association, to rid the bayou of the pesky rodents.

"They're burrowing into our levees," explained neighborhood association member and resident Bobby Wozniak. "They're creating long tunnels that make the ground collapse. Someone's almost broken a leg from falling into a (nutria) hole."

Residents began noticing nutria on the bayou last summer and over the fall and winter, an increasing number of holes and depressions appeared in the banks. Wozniak said the population of nutria between the Dumaine Street and Esplanade Avenue bridges was estimated at about 20.

"But they breed so rapidly and have litters every four months or so," he said.

The neighborhood association inquired about the possibility of the New Orleans Police Department obtaining a permit from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to shoot nutria on the bayou, as the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office did along that parish's canals for years. When that option fizzled -- police were concerned about the safety of shooting on the near-horizontal plane of the bayou and its banks -- neighborhood representatives talked to private trappers.

Live traps, the trappers said, would be safer but could be ineffective. "Kill" traps, however, posed a risk to pedestrians on the bayou.

"It's very difficult to use live traps with nutria, so you'd have to use kill traps. It's a little more difficult, though, because people can get hurt," said Hotard, who learned of the neighborhood association's problem from media reports and contacted the group directly to share his canine method.

Hotard has been using Patterdale terriers to track and retrieve nutria for about a year. The small, compact dogs average 12 pounds -- about the size of a nutria -- and resemble a cross between a Labrador retriever and a Jack Russell terrier. Hotard described them as "a bundle of energy, very sweet ... and hyper."

The dogs are small enough to track the nutria in their own tunnels and often retrieve them live, carrying them in their mouths back out of the hole. Occasionally, if the dog lingers underground too long, the hunters will use the dog's tracking collar to determine its location and dig down directly above the animals to retrieve them. The tunnels can be more than 100 feet long.

When retrieved live, the nutria are clubbed on the head to quickly kill them. The carcasses are buried on-site or are redeemed for the state's "$5 a tail" nutria control program, which began in 2002 to decrease the numbers of the invasive critters. The nutria's voracious appetite for aquatic plants is among the many factors conspiring to erode Louisiana's coastal wetlands.

One nutria captured Tuesday afternoon by a Patterdale named Cybill, who emerged with a small bloody scrape on her lip and energy to spare, was buried on the banks of the bayou. The fate of the nutria that Goldberg, the first dog, had in pursuit was more mysterious.

Hotard and his associates were visibly disturbed by the presence of spectators to the hunt and were evasive about the whereabouts of the dog, first claiming that the tracking collar was not functioning because of concrete, and then saying the dog was not wearing a tracking collar.

After about an hour, an associate reported that the dog had emerged with the dead nutria at the other end of the tunnel down the bayou and already had been put back in its kennel.

"We finished up," Hotard said later by phone. "We got two (nutria) for the day."

Neighborhood association members said no one has objected to the canine hunting method. The group has raised $1,000 in a matter of months to finance the operation and is prepared to pay more if the three hunts laid out in the contract do not suffice, Wozaniak said.

Hotard plans to bring the dogs out again for the second hunt in about a week, he said.