The title company told my wife there is a lien on our house for several thousand dollars.
After going back and forth, it was put on by a property management company.
Apparently, a person with the same first and last name as my wife trashed one of their apartments and left with a lot of unpaid rent.
So they put a lien on our house because this shitbag and my wife have the same first and last name? I didn’t say middle name, because my wife doesn’t even have one and I’m guessing this other person does. Clue #1 that it ain’t my wife you need the lien against, idiots.
So the GQ is, how can you just find someone with a name and put a lien on their house? How does that even make it through the legal process?
And yes, I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t my wife. The title company says that the management company that placed it is working on clearing it up.
ETA: Wouldn’t somebody have to be served some kind of legal paperwork for this? Have to appear in court? Something?
Do you currently own the house outright, or do you owe a mortgage? If it’s the latter, I would think their legal department would get involved pretty quickly. I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing that title insurance would cover - I know they cover defects in title at the time of purchase but not sure about after.
liens are basically threats. By themselves they don’t produce anything. In my experience it is relatively easy to put a lien on a property. Just fill out a form, provide a bit of backup paperwork that there is a debt, and on it goes. It is up to the person owning the property to find out about it and challenge it. As you found out, just knowing that a lien exists is a challenge. The courts don’t monitor the notification process. That is up to the person putting the lien in place. If they don’t do a good job, you will be in the dark until it comes time to sell the property. Collecting on a lien is harder though… Once actual money is at stake people tend to be more careful.
Remember the vast majority of liens are relatively small amounts of money placed there due to a dispute. Usually a contractor. If the people involved were really serious about winning the dispute they would file suit. Think of a lien as insurance by the person placing it. It postpones a legal confrontation till a later date.
You are right to be annoyed but in that-join the club. Just be glad you don’t live in a subdivision with mandatory dues-about the only way the association can enforce the dues is a lien on the property. Talk about divisive!
How in the HELL do yout put a lein on the wrong person’s house!?
I think that’s your answer. Whoever started the process, found her name and assumed it was the same person.
I suppose the renter could have figured this out as well and given your address to the property manager as their new address, but I doubt it.
As far as the middle name, I don’t think that would play into it at all. Since your wife is listed without a middle name, it would be an honest (IMO) mistake to not think anything of that. If she had a middle name (and not the same as the other person) that would be different.
Hopefully, whoever put the lien on your house included other identifying info, like a SSN, or DL number or date of birth. All things that would be easy for your wife to show.
Since the lien company is already working on clearing it up, I wouldn’t worry too much about it so long as you’re not planning to move any time soon.
More importantly, however, once they let you know it’s resolved, I’d tell them you need a lien release or some type of proof from them that there was never a lien on your house, but rather they made a mistake that was later resolved. This, I think, will be important. Nothing may ever become of it, but you’d hate to have it pop up years later…worse even if no one at the lien company remembers it happening so your screwed.
ETA, it may be worth it for you to have a lawyer write something up and send it to all parties involved asking that they expedite the process and request proof that there’s no lien and the lien the placed on your house was a mistake.
That happened to someone I know. They were selling their house and that was the first time they found out there was a lien on their house from 10 or so years earlier.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the lien is placed on the house by the supplier, not the contractor/builder. In this case, they had a new roof installed. They paid for the new roof and the roofing contractor never paid the manufacturer for the shingles. By the time they were selling, the roofer was long since out of business. They paid the manufacturer for the shingles to get the lien release and sell the house. They essentially paid for the roofing job twice.
And with that, with construction jobs, as soon as you make the final payment, be sure to get a lien release, and keep it.
There was a similar story around here. A store that sells home improvement stuff (flooring, kitchen cabinets etc) would also ‘install’, them. The same way that Home Depot/Lowes does installation. You buy from them, they sub out the actual work to a local company. This store went out of business a while back and all the contractors that didn’t get paid, by the store that received money from customers, placed liens on all those houses.
This all still doesn’t make sense. It seems to me that the only person that should be allowed to place a lien on a property is the person that that customer pays.
Having said all that, I’m really surprised that a property management company can place a lien on a house for damage renters did. I thought taking them to court was the typical way to deal with that.
Must be easy. It happened to me and I only found out about it when I went to refinance. The person placing the lien apparently placed liens on every person with my last name and first initial. I had to swear a court affidavit that I had not lived at a specific address in certain years.
Welcome to my world. Every time I have tried to buy a piece of property there have been either judgements against me or liens attached to my existing home. Neither of which were mine.
I have had to get signed affidavits multiple times from friends to prove that the deadbeat screwing up my life isn’t really me. It is far too easy to attach this kind of baggage on someone based solely on their name.
Luckily, since it’s just a refi, they may work around it. When I refi’d my house, they asked if there had ever been a lien on it. I explained that when I installed my roof I signed the lien paperwork, and then showed them the lien release that I got about 72 hours later when they were done (and mentioned that I didn’t think it had ever even been filed anywhere). The person closing the deal mentioned that since it’s a refi it shouldn’t really present a problem. I suppose if it was an actual lien, it would be different since they’d want to use the refi to take some cash out and pay off the lien, but he was making the point that it’s not like I’m going anywhere and there’s plenty of equity in the house if it were to become a problem.
Also, it appears to vary from one place to another but literally 45 seconds of poking around on the internet (got a lot of avvo links) shows everything from letting the closing company take care of it, signing an affidavit swearing it’s not yours, calling the lien company to clear it up all the way to suing for ‘slander of title’.
IMO, you should call whoever is responsible/trying to extract money (the property management company, I assume) and ask them to clear it up ‘today’. If nothing happens, enlist the help of a lawyer. It might cost more, but it’s likely the fastest way to get it taken care of.
Mistaken identity happens frequently.
About 20 years ago I was informed that my driver’s licence was suspended for a DUI in a province that I have never visited.
Turns out there was another guy with my name living on the same street as me for about 4 months.
When I was a teenager, yet another person with my name opened an account at the same bank and managed to drain my account. I had some angry words for the bank.
My boss many years ago had the same first and last name as his step-nephew (His brother had adopted his sister-in-law’s kid). The kid was a real trouble maker. This guy got calls about overdue video rentals and stuff like that. One time he got a call from GM Finance(?) saying “your truck loan is overdue and if you don’t make a payment we’ll repossess the ruck.” He had no such loan, but he figured out right away and so he told them, “F*** you! I dare you to try and take my truck!” Not sure if the truck disappeared or not.
(He also got a visit form HR once asking if he needed counselling about his son’s arrest and drug problem. “Huh? My sons are already moved out, living several provinces over and have no problems.” the nephew had been in the local newspaper about being arrested in a drug deal, and HR assumed it was a junior-senior name thing, that was his son.)
Long time since I worked in this area, so my recollection is very limited, but some liens can be very easy to obtain. Some - such as collections, might require some legal process and some specific notification. But others - such as contractors’ liens - can be of the “fill out a form” at the clerk’s office variety. If you think of it, it makes some sense. A plumber does work on your house and you stiff him. How hard do you want it to be for this guy to protect his interests? So he gets a lien, which essentially gives him nothing UNTIL you sell the house (or refi, etc.)
I don’t know what kind of notification is required of the various liens, but you could always uncover them on a title search (Yeah - a FUN way to spend an afternoon!)
Mistaken liens really oughtn’t be a big deal to correct, tho it can take a couple of letters among lawyers, mortgage insurer, clerk, etc. Can be stressful if you are hoping to close at a specific date near in the future, but not really uncommon and not really a big deal.
I was just reading about Joel and Donna Brinkle, a couple of “sovereign citizen” nutjobs, who although they do not recognize the authority of the government, nevertheless find said government useful in implementing their favorite activity of putting liens on the houses of people they don’t like (a tow truck operator, several local judges, and Bill Clinton, among others). The Florida attorney-general apparently sued them to stop them from filing frivolous liens. I was surprised to read that it required the intervention of the attorney-general to stop such behavior.
This. The company found any property associated in anyway to a name the same or close to the debtors name and threw leins at them until they get challenged or find the one that sticks. It costs them very little and they may recoup their money at some point.
We’ve lived in our house for 30+ years, I could easily imagine if we weren’t to find out about a lien until we tried to sell it, the contractor could be out of business or even dead. It might be tough to prove it wasn’t us.
What about some work done in anticipation of selling a house that is not paid for. Can a lien be placed on the house when the contractor knows the current is not the one the work was done for?
Another unrelated question. If you find an incorrect lien against your property, can you file a lien against that filer’s property to “protect your interests”?
But yeah, liens are pretty weak in some ways, yet strong in others. If you aren’t planning on selling anytime soon, the other party gets nothing. I don’t know whether they would be transferrable or not.
But if you do sell - maybe you die and your heirs want to sell - they have a recorded interest that has to be addressed. Not sure where they stand compared to mortgage holders or other creditors. Since it is attached to a specific property, it has priority over unsecured debt - like credit card debt. If you are suing someone, you pretty much want them to have property and/or earnings. Something you can attach and garnish.
And a lien does not mean they can FORCE you to sell. Each jurisdiction’s law has provisions as to what property/income can be attached/garnished. In some states, liens - and overall collections - are much easier than others. I remember one time I got a judgement against a player on the Houston Oilers. I had neglected to research that in Houston, you cannot attack (IIRC) a person’s house, car, or garnish their wages. So it used to drive my client nuts. Every week he’d call up and say, “I saw that #$%@^# on TV yesterday7! When you gonna get me my MONEY!”
Gotta admit I have ZERO knowledge on how easy liens are to enforce or discharge or anything.
Sorry - been a LONG time since I litigated collections - and I’d just as soon relegate that back to my distant memory!
In case it isn’t obvious from all the posts, liens are:
a) easy to do by design so that small businesspeople have some recourse,
b) the rules vary by state and time.
No one except a lawyer in your state can advise you on what the procedures are.
So the answer is simple… it’s cheap and simple to put a lien on a property, and the penalty for getting it wrong appears to be minimal. So why spend too much time double-checking the details?
