This is a story I heard about a couple of old ladies whom I knew in the Houston Heights. There was a small, dingy apartment complex behind their house and the tenants there would throw empty beer cans over the fence into the ladies’ yard. They approached the apartment managers about the problem, but the management did nothing to address the issue, so these kind old ladies took a trip to the county courthouse.
There, they requested the tax records for the property and upon finding that the taxes were in arrears, they promptly paid them. Then they sent a demand for repayment to the owners of the apartment complex. After receiving no reply, they filed a lien on the property. When the lien was not repaid, they foreclosed. Now, there is no apartment complex, and nobody is throwing empty beer cans into other peoples’ yards on that block.
The moral of this story: do not mess with rich old ladies in Texas.
That’s definitely not universal. Around here, you just need the parcel number and the right amount. Maybe if you paid in person they would check ID, but that might be more to guard against check fraud rather than to make sure you owned the property.
You’re assuming there’s some sort of city register where the ownership of property is set out and the clerks check whether the person paying the taxes is the registered owner.
That’s certainly not how it works in the UK and I’m pretty sure it’s not how it works in Australia.
In the UK, the only ‘property tax’ as such is Council tax and that falls to be paid by the occupier in most case. The owner only has to pay if the property is empty (and that is a quite recent development. Before that, there was nothing to pay if the property was empty).
All a UK local authority cares about is whether council tax is being paid. They don’t care whether you’re the owner or not.
They were out for a walk one day, spotted a dilapidated building, did a bit of research to try and find an owner. When they couldn’t, they did it up, moved a tenant in and 12 years later applied for adverse possession.
As @Mangochin pointed out, renting out a property is one of the most obvious ways of ‘treating is as if it were your own’.
You can’t do this as easily in the UK anymore and this case would have failed in the UK since the law was changed in 2003.
You now either need 12 years adverse possession before 13th October 2003 or if you haven’t got that, you only need 10 years but the registered owners get notified of your application. They then have two years to turf you out. If they don’t, you get the land.
Just to make things more fun, it is now a criminal offence to enter into a domestic property as a trespasser with the knowledge that you are a trespasser or in circumstances where you ought to know and to live there/ enter with the intent to live there for any period.
So renting out an empty domestic property is a far safer way of racking up the needed period of adverse possession than living in it yourself.
The tenant is safe because they haven’t entered in ‘as a trespasser’ knowingly or in circumstances where they ought to know - after all who checks whether the person listed as landlord on your tenancy agreement is the actual owner?
The non-owning landlord is safe because they haven’t entered into the property.
We had a whole bunch of topics a while back about a lovely bunch of rich folks in San Fransico who lost the sidewalks in their gated street because they hadn’t paid the taxes. That took years of non-payment and they got them back in the end.
Well, again that would mean you didn’t notice and weren’t using the land for 12 years. That pretty much indicates that it’s land you weren’t using and aren’t going to miss.
But arguments like that are what prompted the UK to change the law.
Mortgage companies of course effectively own your property. They just let you live there so long as you comply with the mortgage terms.
That’s a slight simplification (at least for the UK) but not much. We don’t actually transfer title to the lender any more but they get all the same rights as when we did.
Another exciting legal concept introduced to us Anglo-Saxons by the Normans.
See in particular the bit about mortgage by demise and mortgage by legal charge.
Since unpaid property taxes could mean the lender loses their security, they will often pay the taxes (and add them to the loan amount of course)
Gertos was paying the land tax since at least 2004.
The NSW system appears to be such that if you own property over a certain value you have to register for land tax and tell the authorities what land you own. Every bit of land has a state-assessed value which you pay tax on.
Do they check whether two people are paying tax on the same bit of land without being registered as joint owners? I doubt it. Why would they?
I do like one of the plaintiffs arguments - that the limitation period shouldn’t run because Mr Downie was someone ‘under a disability’ being unable to manage his affairs by reason of being dead.
As the judge put it:
As I understood the submission, it was put that Mr Downie is a person incapable of managing his affairs by reason of an impairment of his physical condition. However, it seems to me that death is something more than an impairment of one’s physical condition.
More importantly:
In any event, it is my opinion that “person” for the purposes of ss 11(3) and 52 of the Act does not extend to a person who is no longer alive (see Guthrie v Spence (2009) 78 NSWLR 225; [2009] NSWCA 369 at [117]). The event of death brings about the end of the person. The ordinary meaning of “person” does not include those who are no longer alive. The inclusive definition of “person” contained in s 21 of the Interpretation Act 1987 (NSW), which refers to an individual, does not in my view extend to someone who is no longer alive. The language of s 11(3) does not suggest that something different is intended. It makes no sense to speak of a person managing his or her affairs if they are no longer alive. The submission, which was barely developed, is in my view without substance.
Been a land surveyor, now work municipal stuff, publicly available deeds and property tax information are the two ways to discover who owns a piece of real estate in the US. If they aren’t available online in your county, a person could certainly walk down to the county(parish or equivalent entity in a few states) offices and ask to go through the records. The fact that the amount you pay is not private is a function of tax rates and assessments being public data.
To find if it is online for your area, google your county’s Register of Deeds and/or Tax Assessor’s offices. Sometimes the entity requires a fee or registration(common in wealthy enclaves). Sometimes the entity has a GIS (Geographic Information System) that functions as the equivalent, sometimes that is maintained by a city versus a county, but most non rural jurisdictions are in the 21st century at this point.
I was also wondering what a property tax was (I’m from the UK), and it turns out they often don;t bother with them in Australia either:
“Land tax” - also a state tax - is assessed every year on a property’s value. Most Australians do not pay land tax, as most states provide a land tax exemption for the primary home or residence. Depending on the state, surcharge tax rates can apply to foreign owners.[6]
I think property tax is one of those US things that most countries don’t bother with.
Like others here this is the big question for me. I can see doing repairs (investing $150,000 of his own money was taking a huge gamble) even paying for utilities like sewerage/water, but surely there was a tax bill going to someone, or are there no property taxes in this part of Australia?
You have to meet all the requirements to be guilty of the relevant offence.
The landlord is not living there and doesn’t intend to. He’s fine.
The tenant doesn’t know that the landlord has no legal right to rent to him (although even that’s debatable, possession alone is arguably enough to allow you to let the property, it’d just be subject to interruption by the actual owner) so he isn’t in trouble either since he is not living there in the knowledge that he’s trespassing or in circumstances where he ought to know.
Oddly enough, I suspect it’s the other way round and the UK is odd for not doing it. Seems Wikipedia agrees for what that’s worth.
That’s it. You’re all just doing this to wind me up aren’t you?
Sounds to me like the actual owners were not being good custodians of the property which in turn caused harm to the neighborhood and the property values of the surrounding homes due to it being run down.
That’s why someone decided to become a good neighbor and custodian of the property and why that person has a greater claim to the home than the negligent owners.
Myself, I’m a proponent of communities seizing derelict properties and using them as low rent housing for those in need. Ownership of real property takes more than a piece of paper. It requires a certain level of custodianship or it should be relinquished.
My house is below median in my county and my taxes are that high. But I will admit that below average is still “pretty expensive”.
Most likely correct. Depends on location. Land + improvements is the value. Where I live, and for my house in particular, the improvements make up 20-30% of the total assessed value. If you had an abandon house and a corner parcel with adjacent vacant parcel, it could easily be worth over a million. That it’s abandoned means it probably was assessed a very long time ago, so the taxes aren’t going to be high.
But there may be tax liens if an abandoned property hasn’t been paying property taxes, that’s very typical here. Where the city struggled to sell properties that have huge tax liens. Often the lender will choose to pay the lien and take over the property, the lender can also chose to abandon the property as a write off. And if there was no lender because the mortgage is paid, you will have 5 years of tax liens and penalties piled up before it goes to a tax sale (in California). Paying all the fines and taxes for a home redemption is easily going to exceed $10k.
Median income in the US is around $60k/year. If your house taxes are more than 1/6 of your income you’re in a lot of trouble unless you own the house outright. Taxes that high + a mortgage is a death sentence.
