It’s not fun.
I finally turned it over to a rental manager. Costs 10% but it’s worth the bucks. Rents come in on time and I don’t get nibbled with petty repairs.
They’ve probably got an enforcer named Gordo.
In each of these scenarios, the squatter has actually been living there for a while. Although the police will generally tell you it is a civil matter, they are not idiots. If I am there saying that you came over for tea, and you say you have been living there, then they may ask you to point out where you have been sleeping, where is your toothbrush, what does my wife say, what do the neighbors say, how long have you been living here, any documents with this address on them, well, gee it says here that you have a DL that says you live across town, etc.
If you are a real smooth talker and can convince the police that there is room for doubt, then yes, they will tell me it is a civil matter and to have you evicted. But that is true of most things—if you are driving a stolen car, for example, but are able to give enough evidence that you are driving with permission, then they don’t want to be in the habit of just arresting everyone when it is not clear that someone is in the wrong.
But, aren’t those all things for the court to decide because police are not judges as mentioned above?
ISTM that is what was being said above. The police cannot make these determinations.
I say that you said I could stay forever and ever and therefore we have a verbal agreement.
I admit I am pushing the point because I think it is ridiculous. Yet, here we are with a person living in someone’s home with absolutely no proof of a lease or payments or anything except a he said/she said. Apparently you need to go to court and spend thousands to resolve getting a person out of your own basement.
Does the sale to a new owner change anything?
Can the new owner say there was no agreement between them and the squatter and there are no legal obligations that came with the sale? The basement dweller is trespassing and have the police move them out?
Again, it has to at least meet the minimum standards of plausibility. And if it seems as if someone has been living there, as all these cases include, then that is enough to get it into court.
In my state, the new owner takes the same property rights as the old owner. If the old owner is subject to a tenancy agreement, then so are the new owners. @Northern_Piper says it is different where he is from. You may ask how a new owner would know about any tenancy agreement if it was verbal. My state holds that notice is given to a potential buyer if “taking a view” of the property would give them notice, such as seeing a guy in the basement. Then that person should make an inquiry as to the source of the occupancy and such inquiry would put the potential buyer on the hook for whatever property rights the first owner had ceded.
“You can’t sell more than what you own” was how my property law professor described it.
In such cases it seems to me that the party trying to “take” the land is actually trying to steal it. What right can they plausibly actually have to land that another family has been living on as the de facto owners for 200 years?
Landlords have more money for lawyers. And so they toss you and your stuff out, how do you get your stuff back?
Some landlords demand cash for rent.
Leases are not that common, most places have a month to month rental agreement.
It is a civil issue. The landlords can sue to get the squatter/tenant out.
That seems a legal agreement and if, at the end of the month, the landlord says leave then you leave.
Where is the problem? That’s what you agreed to when you moved in.
Anecdotally, on the flip side, I wanted to move out of a place because I was living with my GF and we broke-up. There was maybe ten months on the lease. The landlord absolutely refused to break the lease. I said I would stay until someone else rented the place and would pay for ads (or I would take out ads). Nope. They would have none of it. I was stuck to the lease. Sucked but they were 100% within their rights to enforce it (and I abided by it without fuss).
Yeah, that sounds like a clear case of adverse possession. adverse possession | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
Again, in my state, your landlord would have been partially in the wrong. Yes, what you did was a breach of the agreement, but he has a duty to mitigate his losses which means making a good faith attempt to lease the property. If you were offering to do that, and found someone to take over, you would have had a good case against him. He just can’t sit back for 10 months and take your money if you leave. He has to attempt to mitigate.
But it doesn’t mean that. First what it would mean is that I lied to the police when they showed up and said that you did not limit my occupancy for a few days. You took that risk by not getting anything in writing. And with it being a he said/he said, the police are and should be powerless to make someone homeless based on someone’s word in a summary fashion that way. And it is simply not true that you would be “stuck with me” as you can go to court, which is the thing that society has set up so that we can settle our dispute peacefully. If it turns out that I overstayed my invitation, you can sue me for damages.
But in any event, the idea is that a wrong snap choice can leave someone not only homeless, but improperly homeless. My state has strict time limits on hearing these things such as 10 days until a hearing and out by day 30 if shown to be wrongly occupying property.
I was told I could sub-let the apartment but that was all on me (including if they wrecked the place).
I was still on the hook for honoring the lease I signed (which, again, I get…that is what I agreed to even if it was not convenient later).
What I did not get was their unwillingness to find someone else to rent the place and let me out of the agreement considering I was willing to pay for their efforts to rent the place to someone else.
Not kidding. They were freaking adamant about this. No way, no how, short of death, was I to ever, ever be released from that lease. I did not look in to it but I bet if I died they’d still make me pay out of my estate and let the place sit empty.
In most cases, the landlord would have a duty to mitigate. So to take you to court for the rent, he’d have to show he made a good faith effort (advertise, show inquiring tenants, etc.) to make up for any loss.
In many jurisdictions, there’s always an option to end the lease with a certain amount of notice.
(The “Duty to Mitigate” I recall being discussed once in the case of a sale of a grocery store. The person buying it found out there were a few deficiencies, refused to continue with the sale and make additional, dropped the key in the seller’s mailbox, etc. etc. Apparently this argument and the key went back and forth for months with nobody looking after the store - things got rotten and moldy, vermin, etc. I think it was the seller ended up with the store (since the buyer failed to pay) then he could not collect additional damages for the decay because he’d failed to make a good faith effort to ensure damage did not happen. Until he was paid it was his store. (I believe he could collect the price of the store as stipulated in the contract, but then collecting would be the problem.)
Bad choice of words.
I bought the house next door. The title search revealed that the man who was selling it did not own the house. The house had been left vacant by the death of a distant relative. The man, being homeless, had moved in and lived there for as long as anyone could remember. I don’t recall how it was resolved, but I got title.
Interesting. My parents have a neighbor who moved in when his mother died a couple of decades ago. This guy has a checkered past, and the house never went through probate (?) because- something about him owing a lot of money. And this guy has siblings who are remarkably absent from the scene. This house is almost certainly worth >$750k (it’s a neighborhood where a .25 acre vacant lot is worth $400k). Anyway, the general view is that this will be a giant mess when he dies or is forced to deal with it.
Back before we invented the sort of deed that gets written down and filed in an official office, that was how people did get to own a house – as one generation died, somebody else moved in. Various societies would have had ways to resolve any disagreements.
But yes, I agree that you weren’t trying to steal the place. There are areas in the world where that sort of thing is a serious problem, though – the long-term residents have no legal titles because such things didn’t exist in their society, and sometimes lose their land to corporations or individuals because they can’t prove title in a system being imposed on them later.
Of what era and how long ago are you speaking? Any land in the original 13 colonies can be traced back to a royal land grant, and elsewhere to a land patent from the United States Government. Land title has typically been a very well documented thing, at least in the United States. Searching the courthouse land records for “clean” title is an essential part of purchasing property, and banks will not loan money without it.
What you and @Crane are speaking about is what I mentioned above: the doctrine of adverse possession. It solves many issues because of improper deeds or people abandoning property so long as the practice meets all of the criteria for adverse possession.
I assume that’s why the City, State and Feds are concerned about finding and removing squatters. It’s usually complicated, like people moving into abandoned mining claims or ghost towns.
Depends on where you are in the world. Could be any time from right now to hundreds or thousands of years ago.
The situation regarding individual rights to houses etc. on Native land within the United States appears to be complicated and variable.
It’s my understanding that even aside from that issue, there are cases in the United States in which in some communities some real estate has been passed down for generations without clear legal title. I’m sure it was under some land patent or grant at some point in its history, but things may have become blurrier since. You’re right that getting standard bank loans on such property is likely to be difficult or impossible.
In New York State, in an area with courthouse-registered deeds all over the place, I bought a property in the late 1980’s on which the property line in one corner up in the woods was unclear to everybody. There was a landlocked piece in the woodlot, which had presumably originally been deeded to a non-contiguous property in the 1800’s to allow that property to have a woodlot for fuel; the deed specified the acreage size of the property and the location of one of the boundary lines, but not of any of the others, so there was no way to tell whether it was a long narrow rectangle or a square or something inbetween. The property I bought, the woodlot piece, and the property that the woodlot piece went with had all been in the same overall family since the 1880’s until I came along, and nobody had cared about the exact dimensions. The surveyors gave up and went away (they never billed me, either, though they’d found all the other property lines where expected.) The relevant neighbors who I talked to thought they knew what shape it was – but they didn’t agree with each other in detail, though they all agreed about the approximate location.
I bought the place anyway (private funding) on the grounds that there was no question about the general location or the total size, and it didn’t actually make any difference to me what shape that bit of woodlot was, as there was plenty of other woodlot that was clearly mine and there were no lanes or anything that I might be losing access to. Eventually somebody else in that family died, and the heirs offered to solve the problem by selling me the piece, quite cheaply as it had no legal access without my permission (there may have been legal access in the original deed or by a known lane, but if so this had dropped out of existence over the years.) But many years later there turned out to be a dispute over the exact location of the one line I’d thought was clear, which had to be settled by both parties agreeing to one surveyor’s opinion and signing off on that.
There are odd little bits and pieces like that all over the place, even in New York. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in some areas there are larger such bits, some of them with houses on them.
Even passing something through intestate succession is clear legal title, though. Many times title researchers get “heirship affidavits” if there is no will on file for the person named in the deed. Sometimes this is impossible, but for a place with a house on it or something in use, this is where adverse possession does give a person clear legal title.
This is different as it is a boundary dispute. This happens typically because some old deeds refer to landmarks that no longer exist such as “the giant oak” or “the corner of the old Smith farm.” Adverse possession doesn’t come into play because most of the time people are not putting it to the continuous use required by that doctrine. Typically it isn’t a problem as it wasn’t in your situation because the piece of land was small and such that nobody felt it had enough economic worth to fight over. When someone did, a court is capable of finding a solution.
This is a story from the middle of the last century:
The company I worked for had an office and workshop not far from the middle of town. Behind the building, there was a large open space - it had once been a factory or something that was bombed out in WW2. There were many such gaps still waiting for development in the 50s and 60s.
The staff did notice that a small shed had been placed in the middle of the area, and there was sometimes a man pottering around. They thought nothing of it until a man went to court to claim squatter’s rights.
Apparently, he had fulfilled the letter of the law by erecting a building and marking out the area (he drove corner posts in). Then "squatting on the land, unchallenged for (I think) 12 years.
The case went on for a year or two. Part of the problem was that no one could identify the legal owner of some parts. Eventually, he won his case and went on to sell the plot for over £1million.