I rent my house from “Diane.” Diane never set foot in the attic. Diane bought the house from “Philbert,” who built the house and lived here for 40 years before selling it to Diane.
So let’s say this spring I venture up into the attic, for the lulz, and find priceless treasure (rare baseball cards, a menu from Titanic, whatever). Does it belong to me, Diane, or Philbert?
Disclaimers: this is in Missouri, if it matters. You are not my lawyer, I am not your client, I am not seeking legal advice, this is all hypothetical, yada yada yada.
Hypothetically, you’re a crook. You’re probably a crook just for thinking there’s some sort of loophole here that wouldn’t make you a crook. If you’re Catholic, go to confession just to be safe.
If this is true (which I believe it is in the majority of jurisdictions) and the object is sufficiently valuable, the hypothetical renter might want to make a purchase offer on the house in order to gain ownership of the treasure. Would the renter need to disclose the presence of the treasure to the owner when making the offer? I seem to recall this sort of thing happening in the past where oil prospectors would make lowball offers to buy farms without telling the owners that oil was found on their property.
Well, one could argue that by junk, I meant “stuff.” And there’s the story in the television journalist Sam Donaldson’s memoir of the foreign correspondent who sent a telegram to his superiors asking if they’d pay to ship his “junk” to the US. Of course in this case, it was a Chinese boat of the type called a “junk.”
Or a better suggestion; ask the landlord if it’s OK for you to clear the attic so you can use it for storage, without describing the contents in any way. There’s the possibility that the landlord will want to inspect the attic first, though.
Or you could have just called it “stuff”, or by some other neutral descriptor. E.g. “Hey, I was thinking about moving my old couch up the the attic. What do you want done with those old rusty swords?” If the treasure is a set of rare medieval swords, then describing them as “old rusty swords” is certainly correct (they are swords, they are old, and they are [probably] rusty), and of course most non-Autistic people know that one does not usually need to disclose all possible facts as long as one is truthful.
You are still deceiving the landlord as to the purpose of acquiring the contents of the attic, since you already know that there are valuables there and the “cleaning” is merely a ruse.
I’m not sure it’s exactly deceiving. It has some similarities buying a Picasso at a flea market for 10 bucks. It’s negotiating with someone who is ignorant of the true value of their property. It’s not nice, but I’m not sure I would go all the way to calling it deceptive.
At the yard sale, the person put it out on the lawn to be sold. Why not take that particular valuable item from the attic to the homeowner and ask her how much you can have it for?
The Fella and I rent a house that my parents own. (They got into flipping and then the market fell out and now they have about 5 rent houses.) According to them they got it lock, stock and barrel and told us “everything in it is ours/if you go in the attic and you want it, take it/ please throw out anything you don’t want, b/c we don’t want it” So far it’s been some odd Christmas ornaments. (And yes, I checked, they weren’t the good ones.) But there was this one sled thingy that had a tag on it from the seventies that said it cost $98. I kept that one, b/c hey, it’s been up there for years. And it was pretty.
I do think that the stuff actually belonged to at least a few people before the guy my folks got the house from. The Fella and I have been visited by both (we figured out later) a bounty hunter. And a young pair of uniformed cops who were trying to return a lost wallet.
We haven’t taken everything out of the attic yet, but I would feel, at this point, that anything we found would be ours. And my landlords would agree. THEY had no desire to crawl around in an attic.
BUT! If I really did find something worth millions, I would offer money to my folks, then we’d debate, and I’d end up settling for 15%-20% to them.
I would think that no, the renter would not have to disclose the presence of the treasure. The buyer need not disclose anything to the seller about what it contains.
How do you know if it’s valuable? Remember, many things that look antique and valuable turn out to be trash.
The water may get murky if you have had the item appraised. If you had it appraised, then made an offer…