That was my thought exactly. Sure it might be considered a crime. But not a crime a city would go out of its way to enforce or pay notice of.
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If you represent yourself as the owner I’d have to think it would be. Alternatively, you’d think that somebody might get suspicious if somebody was paying gift taxes for over a decade, but maybe not. Local civil servants I’m sure aren’t beyond reproach, but either way, something smells slightly fishy here to me.
At least in my city, there is a website where property tax bills are viewed and paid. You can enter any address (or parcel #) you want and find out who owns it, what the valuation is and what their tax bill is.
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Sort of. Not the tax bill but a lot of the property tax info is available online… at least in the state of Texas the property tax info is public information. Including the valuation of the house so it wouldn’t be hard work to deduce or find out what the tax bill is (especially if the owner is AWOL). For my job i’ve had to go digging online to confirm information or contact the real owners of a piece of property. This might not be the same in every state though.
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As I understand it, you are wrong. I’m not fully clear on it, but my understanding is that if you are in tax arrears, you can have your house “bought out from under you” by someone paying off those taxes. Rules probably differ by jurisdiction.
So you have a couple of richie-riches who can’t be buggered to review all the assets in their inheritance, and a derelict house turning into a neighborhood blight, and everyone is trying to make a villain out of the guy who fixed it up and maintained it for two decades.
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Honestly i do think its an asshole thing to do to takeover someone else’s property, especially this guy since he had no intention of living there. He rented it out so for him his incentive was economic. But the Australian court sided with him so however i feel about it he’s the new owner.
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It’s not instantaneous, AFAIK – the property tax bill has to be delinquent for so many years, or be some percentage of the assessed value of the property. If you skip a year, the tax office can’t come along and take your property immediately, otherwise a lot of property going through probate would be forfeit.
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As for the rightness/wrongness in this case, I do think its similar to if someone is selling an antique they aren’t aware is worth a lot more than what they are selling it for. They are losing something (the difference in value) they didn’t know they had- and yet I’ll give a pretty damn hard side-eye at someone saying that’s just the seller’s tough luck and it’s a-ok to take advantage of someone’s ignorance. Most people will at least try to come up with a reasonable rationalization, like that person is so much better off than you are, wouldn’t miss it, I invested in being an expert on these things, etc.
That said, I don’t have a problem with the rationale behind squatter’s rights.
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In the eyes of the law, the guy who fixed it up and maintained it, is a hero. As his reward he gets rightful legal title of the property.
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When I was younger and a lot dumber, there was an apparently abandoned house, with an overgrown yard, no lights after dark, peeling paint and no signs of occupancy, in a fairly tony neighborhood near me. I wonder if I’d been able to squat there quietly for seven-odd years if I could have taken adverse possession, or if the neighbors would have noticed and complained.
eta: Apparently someone eventually took notice, because the house is now in use.
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The person took over abandoned unused property and made productive use of it. 12 years is a long time for someone not to notice is using property without your permission.
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EDIT - never mind, it looks like the owners were well aware of the property’s existence - they just neglected it for 20 years and then got mad when someone else didn’t. From TFA:
Mr Downie’s relatives testified that the family had vacated the house before World War Two due to an ant infestation, after which it was rented to a sole tenant. That tenant leased the home until her death in April 1998.
The family argued that Mr Gertos had not acted in an “open” manner, meaning he should not be able to claim ownership through squatting laws.
But Justice Rowan Darke disagreed, ruling: “Mr Gertos succeeded in taking and maintaining physical custody of the land, to the exclusion of all others.”
If I read this right, the former occupant was renting the place from some time in the 1940s until 1997. The landlord died in 1947 - so I’d guess one of these conditions applied for 50 years:
1) the tenant kept paying rent to the same property management company they always had, which handled the mortgage and taxes and duly forwarded the surplus to an account the landlord’s heirs didn’t know they had, or
2) the tenant knew his landlord had died and decided to lie low and live rent free for as long as he could, and nobody from the city came around to investigate the decades of property taxes that weren’t getting paid.
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There are instances where it isn’t quite so clear, like boundary or shared areas (driveways come to mind). Say you’re a bit fuzzy on exactly where your property line is, and the neighbor puts up a fence there. They could easily carve off a foot or two, and unless you contested it in court, after several years you might have lost a strip of land that was actually yours, but the neighbor (accidentally or on purpose) took it over.
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Turns out the occupant, who had been renting it since around the 1940s, had died earlier that year.
Whatever Gertos’ legal rights to the property, he sounds like the kind of charmer who kept the corpse of the deceased somewhere on the premises all these years “just in case.”
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There was a case just like that here in Alberta.
Here’s another case:
I’m pretty sure mortgage companies are entitled to know about unpaid taxes and pay them (and add it to the debt).
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Yeah, this doesn’t make sense to me (emphasis mine):
But the descendants of previous owner Henry Thompson Downie, who died in 1947, launched a legal challenge last year after Mr Gertos applied for ownership.
Mr Downie’s relatives testified that the family had vacated the house before World War Two due to an ant infestation, after which it was rented to a sole tenant. That tenant leased the home until her death in April 1998.
So “the family” was renting it out from 1947 to 1998, but they weren’t considered “owners”? When the tenant died, the family didn’t do anything with it and just ignored it for a couple decades, I guess?
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If you pay someone’s taxes that’s like new income. Which they must report. If the amount you paid is significant, you may be committing a type of wire fraud by not reporting personal transfers over $10k.
I’m quite sure it’s not a crime to pay others’ property tax in the U.S., because I have never paid my own property tax bill. The mortgage holder on ‘my’ houses has always insisted on paying to protect their interests in the place. I still get a bill mailed to my address every year, but it just serves as a ‘look, it went up again’ kind of curiosity for me, knowing the difference will come out of the escrow account with the mortgager and that I needn’t do anything but stay current with my payment.
I don’t know if the mortgagers had to provide any evidence of their interest to pay or not. As others have said, as long as the bill is paid, the assessor probably doesn’t get too worried about it.
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If you put 20% down when you buy the house you get the option to pay your own taxes. It’s better because otherwise your lender is taking the tax out each month and then paying it every six months and earning the interest on your money while they sit on it.
Also, mortgage companies aren’t always the best at paying on time and if they pay late you are responsible for the penalties (see page 27, paragraph 18 in your mortgage agreement). Ask me how I know and why I pay my own taxes now.
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