Posted on 03/08/2023 2:09:58 PM PST by nickcarraway
A man lost his more than $100,000 property in a Delaware beachside community after his neighbor claimed squatter’s rights during a court battle over the parcel.
Burton Banks was forced to transfer to Melissa Schrock the title of the undeveloped land he inherited from his late father due to the little-known adverse possession code in the Diamond State, according to the Delaware News Journal.
Banks reportedly wanted to sell part of the Ocean View property in 2021, worth about $125,000, when he discovered Schrock had had a goat pen on it for decades. She also used about two-thirds of the acre belonging to Banks for other purposes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The Joetato state!
I believe that most if not all states have an adverse possession law.
Remove the goats and neighbor. Problem solved.
15 years in MN
A trash way to steal land.
His husband might not have approved of Burton Banks committing open violence...
A trash way to steal land.
Not even forty acres and a mule
see my post #9
If that ever happened to me I can’t be sure that I wouldn’t have reacted very,*very* forcefully!
Go after the squatter for back taxes.
Give the lowlife a plot at the nearest cemetery.
Gotta watch your stuff or it will grow legs and walk.
Why can’t you shoot intruders on your property?
> Go after the squatter for back taxes.
We have a winner!
Yes, and it kind of stinks. The use of the property by a neighbor may have originally been granted by the landowner of the time, but it was never meant to be in perpetuity and certainly not if the later owner didn’t know about it.
Squatters all over the country have used this to steal property.
And legal in most, if not all states. The difference is generally in how long the “squatter” - aka the one stealing the property has to be in possession/use of the property before they gain legal rights to it. In some cases, the original owner must not have made any “improvements” or maintained the property...
I have never understood how this can be Constitutional or what these laws were meant to address. But I have seen it used in some very ugly and injust ways over the years.
This is a reminder of why you MUST be vigilant to defend your property - it can be taken for something as simple as - a neighbor builds a fence that is actually encroaching on your side of the property line. You say nothing - as you feel like you benefit from the fence... but 8 years (or however long down the line your state law mandates), that neighbor could go to court and get an order that the encroached on bit of land is now theirs -and you would have essentially NO case - unless you can prove that you formally argued before the filing of the case.
I’ve seen this done with property that the owner of record didn’t know they had been left the property by a deceased family member - someone saw that it wasn’t being used - and just moved in - and because the heir lived many hours away and was unaware - they lost the property.
And there are people who now actually make money by practicing this game -
And its why you should ALWAYS run off trespassers, including homeless folks who might sneak out to your property or woods and sleep/camp.
It helps to visit the property every year and clear crap off of it.
I would have torn that pen down and made it perfectly clear that if she built on my land again, I would slaughter or sell anything she put there.
Tip of the day: Hire a property management company. Pay them a few bucks a month to check on these things. If a property management company was in place, this would not have happened. They would have hired a crew to yank that stuff up, called animal control to move the livestock, etc., in short made life very difficult for that encroaching neighbor.
Most certainly, they would still have that land.
In CA at least, you have to have being paying the property tax on the portion you were adversely possessing
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