I’m my Mom’s executor and the estate has two other heirs, besides me. There is a parcel of unimproved desert property in San Bernadino County, valued for tax purposes at $728. It’s obviously not worth paying a realtor to sell. It may not be worth the fee to change the title.
When I say unimproved, I mean that there are no utilities anywhere near it. My Uncle has been hinting that if we gave it to him, he could park a trailer on it. But he and his wife are in their seventies and neither one of them are good at thinking ahead. Consensus is that things would go very badly.
Property taxes are $10.98 per year. We could just keep paying without transferring title. Or we could stop paying and let it revert for taxes owed. Is there a way to announce that the owner has died and no one wants to assume the title?
Is there a cheap way to sell it on Craigslist? The only people I can imagine buying it are people like my folks, who were taking a gamble that some day development would seep out that way.
I’ve been trying to find a way to see the location on a map, but it has no address, only an APN number. I’ll keep poking Google to see what I can find.
I’m not looking for legal or financial advice, just possibilities.
For gosh’s sake. Pay the $11 dollar a year property tax and keep it. That’s less than 4 bucks each for you and the other owners. You don’t need to be in a hurry to sell this. That’s my 2 cents anyway.
Keep it. Follow the adage: never sell land unless you are desperate for money. For $10.98 a year… you never know what the future holds. It may have oil, uranium… be developed… a theme park, harvesting of gophers… The future is hidden.
well, it’s not much of a gamble, is it? What’s the most you can lose?–$10.98 per year?.
You’ve got a free* lottery ticket in your hands. Keep the property and pass it on to your heirs, or grandchildren. You’ll be dead by then, but they will live into the 22nd century. And by then, it’s very likely that development will seep out that far.
First, get the correct spelling, it’s San Bernardino–two R’s.
Hang onto it, if you wish, but it would take a LONG time for it to realize any value. While there is a lot of development in the desert area, it’s a BIG desert, and unless the property is near Hesperia, Victorville, or Barstow, there is literally nothing else out there. If it’s out by Amboy or Ludlow, a person would have to have an individual interest to being there.
Right now, WATER is your biggest problem. The San Bernardino desert is quickly becoming overdeveloped, and everyone wants water. Even should you drill your own well, there are no assurances the water you find will continue to be there in years to come. Plus there are areas of the aquifer that are tainted with Chromium.
Aunt and Uncle need to put a lot of thought into “moving a trailer out there” before they do anything. Aside from water, they’d also need a septic system, since those are mandated by San Bernardino County. Access is another detail: deserts are subject to flash floods, and the road you find today may not be there tomorrow. Folks in their seventies are also interested in medical care, and a trip to Las Vegas or San Bernardino could be a hardship.
If you and the heirs don’t wanna screw with it, call the Assessor’s office and tell 'em you wanna give it back.
~VOW
Note that the annual cost of a vacant property is not just taxes.
You may also be liable for injuries that occur on your property. Which means you should have insurance coverage.
You are also responsible for maintaining the property according to local code. E.g., if there’s a pile of tires on it, you might have to remove them or pay a fine. People dump garbage on vacant lots all the time. And once it’s dumped there, it’s your responsibility. (Unless you find an envelope at the bottom of the pile of garbage with “Arlo Guthrie” on it.)
If you don’t want the land and it’s not going to be worth anything in the foreseeable future, get rid of it ASAP. Not paying taxes is the last resort. But note that this can have an impact in other regards. In this situation, figure out how not to take title at all without messing up closing the estate.
Charities take cars and such. Do they take land like this?
Many counties in Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, and California have enormous areas of these “obsolete subdivisions.” Most of the “ranchettes” were sold via magazine ads or promotions in the 1960s, and the owners have never seen the lots. Many of the roads are not graded (or were never built) so you’d have a tough time getting to the property, and would have to have a surveyor tell you where it is. There are no utilities serving the lots, though you see the occasional trailer parked out there, “off the grid.”
In any affected county, hundreds of these lots are abandoned every year through nonpayment of taxes. Call the county assessor or collector; she gets a dozen such calls every week. Chances are she will send you a simple form where you can simply state your intention to affirmatively abandon ownership. This saves the county a lot of paperwork (and you a lot of official-looking mail) to get it to an “auction” where no one will bid anyway.
Salton Sea is in Riverside County; the OP’s property is in San Bernardino County.
Salton Sea has gone out of favor in recent years.
To Saint Cad: The availability of water has a dampening affect on desert properties. There are so many lawsuits underway in the San Bernardino County desert area, and the constant building of new subdivisions which are also drinking up vast amounts of the aquifer means this part of California will be a battleground for years to come.
~VOW
Which is why I think there would be little interest in a house-sized parcel out there. No one will biuld in San Berdoo in the middle of nowhere. But there is always an interest in raw land. Even if only one or two people would want to buy 40 acres out there the OP could sell it.
It’s not just desert areas that see “water wars.” The Atlanta area is overdeveloped, and the most recent flare-up of the Georgia-Tennessee border dispute (in 2008) was basically just a thinly-disguised attempt by Georgia to gain access to the Tennessee River so they could divert water to Atlanta.
There’s also occasional talk of building a huge pipeline to take water out of the Great Lakes. All the states & provinces that border the Great Lakes are dead-set against it, and any attempt to build such a pipeline could quite conceivably lead to a mini-revolt, and very probably violence against the pipeline workers. (This is not an issue that Great Lakes-region residents take lightly.)
