Has it ever happened that property has been seized in relation to drug offenses, when the offender in fact had already sold the property to someone else?
A friend of mine (no it is not me) has just found out the current owner of a home she is purchasing is probably involved in drug dealing. He has not occupied the home in over 18 months but I am wondering whether this fact about the owner could come back to bite her nonetheless.
IANAL, but my wild-assed guess: if the government intended to seize, they would have put a lien on it and title would be difficult to transfer. If they hadn’t initiated any seizure action by the time the property changed hands, then their (future) case is now against the proceeds from the sale not the original property.
And it’s the responsibility of the title company to research it to find out. Make sure you get title insurance to protect yourself. In my state at least you can back out of a purchase at closing if something hinky turns up that had not been previously disclosed. (In my case the seller had liens various family members had acquired on the house and not told her about. There was a fight in the lawyer’s office, they had to step out and yell at each other in the hallway while I drank a diet coke. Oh, yeah, and one of the men in the family had some kind of court orders that needed to be paid off with the profit from the house. I think the now deceased parents had left all this crap on the house and their daughter who inherited it didn’t know about it. The closing was exciting though to watch. The seller was a woman, and for a short fat girl she could move like a snake. I thought one of her brothers was going to pee in his pants when she turned on him when it was disclosed about the lien due to the court case.)