Posted on 12/11/2023 7:39:10 AM PST by lowbridge
A man in the U.K., who took over a retiree’s empty home in London and gained legal ownership of it under a "quirky" ancient Roman law, has sold the property for a profit, local media reports.
A British construction worker identified as Keith Best spotted an empty three-bedroom, semi-detached home in London’s Newbury Park back in 1997 while working a construction job nearby, according to Express. Best began renovating the property and ultimately moved his family into the home in 2012.
The house, however, belonged to retiree Colin Curtis, who lived on the property with his mother until the late 1990s, when he moved out. Curtis inherited the property, but under what has been described as a "quirky" ancient Roman law that allows "someone in possession of a good without title to become the lawful proprietor if the original owner didn't show up after some time," Best became the home’s legal owner, the Guardian previously reported.
Best had filed an application for adverse possession about a decade ago in order to legally obtain the property. The Chief Land Registrar initially denied the application following a law that criminalized squatting, but the ruling was overturned by the High Court in 2014 when a judge ruled the Registrar's decision was "founded on an error of law," the Daily Mail reported.
The judge ruled that previous laws approached squatting issues as civil matters, and despite the judge finding Curtis committed criminal trespass, he was granted ownership of the home. The judge found that at least 10 years had passed "without effective action by the owner" to take control of the property.
"This judgement recognises that making residential squatting a criminal offence was not intended to impact on the law of adverse possession, which is an old and quirky law,"
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
“Squatters are a plague, both in the UK and here, and their crimes need to be punished in criminal courts, not civil courts!”
A 50 something male adult/son of friends invited his 30 something nephew to stay with him while recovering alcohol/drug addiction.
After a week, the nephew claimed squatters rights on his uncle’s home. Basically the cops/DA just turned their heads re helping the uncle.
The nephew had an operation removing one of his feet due to poor health/circulation.
The day before his nephew got out of the recovery unit post op, the uncle gave him the key to a new storage unit and told the nephew, that he was no longer a squatter in the uncle’s home.
Any forced entry into the uncle’s home would now be considered criminal forced entry.
The local DA’s office could then order the county sheriff to arrest the nephew and put him in jail.
My Mother-in-law’s boyfriend is a retired NYC police detective, who also worked for Miami-Dade PD for several years.
When he first moved to Florida, he told me two of his co-worker cops were complaining about an assignment they had to perform that day because it was typical Florida weather, very hot and humid.
He asked them what it was and they said, “We have to evict someone.”
Curious, he followed along to see what they were going to do.
Being from the Bronx, NYC, his entire life, he was shocked to see them having to evict the people from the property along with all their stuff, furniture and all, they had to tote out of the house and deposit at the curb. He had never seen that before!...............
“Under the circumstances, his profit is 100%.”
If he bought something for $100 and sold it for $200 his profit would be 100%.
He was a squatter so I don’t believe he paid anything for that house, did he? Whatever he invested into the house if anything would be quite small compared to the sale price I suppose.
Thus his profit percentage would be orders of magnitude greater than 100% and approaching infinity mathematically speaking.
All right! Keeping up that tradition! Me, too (frequently).
Let me tell you about squatters. I had a rental home (I could not sell it after moving to a new state for a job), so I stopped paying the mortgage and the property was foreclosed and sold at auction. Nobody lost money, and the police would not help because the squatters were the subject of an active investigation. So title passed to a new owner and I am no longer the owner of the property.
And the ending it perhaps the worst of it: "He sold the home to Atiq Hayat, 35, for £540,000." 'Nuff said.
The crime WAS punished in a criminal court.
"...and despite the judge finding Curtis committed criminal trespass, he was granted..."
10 years? Sounds like no one cared that the squatter took up residence.
I have a friend who owns some property and has gone through the route of evicting tenants. Here in Kentucky at least you have to pay the sheriff to come out and evict somebody and then you have to pay them to remove the tenants’ property from the house. I know it took her almost a year to get the non-paying renters out of the house so she lost a year’s rent as well as the not inconsiderable expense of the legal action to have their asses thrown out.
I did not mention the damage to the property that the renters did once they stopped paying. It seems to be a tradition among non-paying renters that they are compelled to trash the property before they are evicted.
you’d think those laws would be revisited, and you’d be wrong...
Well I’m not arguing the law, it is what it is, the idea that the government is doing this because it’s any of their damn business what you do with the property. If you want to own property and not make it productive that’s your business. At least it should be. This idea that the government can say we don’t think you are using your property the way it should be used so we’re going to let somebody else have it is basically communism.
10yrs is a long time. I guess Colin Curtis didn’t need the money or he would have sold it.
You might want to look up "adverse posession" laws. It's a common feature of most nations that inherit the British common law, like we did.
The house, however, belonged to retiree Colin Curtis, who lived on the property with his mother until the late 1990s, when he moved out. Curtis inherited the property, but under what has been described as a "quirky" ancient Roman law that allows "someone in possession of a good without title to become the lawful proprietor if the original owner didn't show up after some time,"The judge ruled that previous laws approached squatting issues as civil matters, and despite the judge finding Curtis committed criminal trespass, he was granted ownership of the home. The judge found that at least 10 years had passed "without effective action by the owner" to take control of the property.
Then I noticed this:
The home was worth roughly £400,000 when Best took over the property. He sold the home to Atiq Hayat, 35, for £540,000 - the equivalent of roughly $682,000 - meaning he made a profit of roughly £140,000, or $177,000, the Daily Mail found.If Best got the house without paying for it his profit was the full £540,000 ($682,000).
The author and editor need to be fired.
To be fair, the squatter paid forthe repairs and renovations he did and also the property taxes or it long ago wouls have been in tax foreclosure.
It’s not a bad plan if you possess the dyi skills to rehabilitate abandoned properties.
You have to not use the property for a long time. You have to not bother checking on it and seeing that somebody else is using it. In the modern context, you have to not pay the property tax for it - for years and years. You have to take no action to evict somebody else who is on the property and using it.
What it amounts to is you basically have to abandon the property. Governments adopt policies like this to “quiet title” so that they don’t have a situation in which people suddenly appear and say “hey this dead from 1842 shows this property really belonged to my ancestor and therefore it should be mine”. If they allowed that, it would discourage investment in property but doing things like putting houses or buildings on that property. Imagine if the various Indian tribes could go to the court and legally dispossess tens of millions of homeowners of their homes.....
Adverse possession is part of the common law and is covered by state statute AFAIK in all 50 states. The requirements to satisfy all the elements of adverse possession will differ by state, but it definitely exists.
Adverse and hostile - ie you not asking permission
Continuous and exclusive - going on the property occasionally will not satisfy it. The adverse possessor must be on the property continuously. Also the adverse possessor is not sharing it with others or claiming to be part of a group which owns it.
Open and Notorious - it can't be secret or hidden. You have to be doing it openly such that others can see you're using the property. Several states require that you have paid the property taxes to satisfy this.
For the statutory period....10 years in common law more or less depending on the state.
There was a famous case of this when somehow the plot map of properties a developer put out was one lot off from the plot map that was filed with the state. The upshot was everybody for several whole neighborhoods did not really own the house they were in. They actually owned their neighbor's house next door.
Not a problem you say? It was potentially a big problem. Not every house was exactly the same. If you were on a smaller lot or had a less expensive house than your neighbor, you had a financial incentive to make a claim to your neighbor's house and land.
The Court ruled that every homeowner owned his home by adverse possession and that this therefore quieted title....ie nobody can press any claims that might otherwise have been technically legal but.....c'mon....that would have been scummy and would have caused chaos. Courts do not like instability and chaos and for public policy reasons, will take steps to prevent it whenever they can.
I understand your points and don’t disagree.
If I pay the property taxes on time and don’t let the property become a nuisance to the surrounding properties, then I am only saying that the government should have nothing to say about it.
Courts are a joke. Good luck.
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