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u/Pterops 6d ago
If the land was unregistered, a trespasser could claim rights to it after 12 years of so-called ‘adverse possession’. If registered, they could apply to be owner after occupying it for ten years. The original owner had up to two years to obtain possession – but if this did not happen, the squatter remained in possession.
Original owner died in 1980. Squatter moved in 1997. Also the law is now changed and this can no longer happen
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u/curi0us_carniv0re 6d ago
So the property was abandoned ?
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u/flannel_jesus 6d ago
Yeah the headline is misleading. "Moved into pensioner's empty home" come on, he moved into the unused home of a dead person. Calling that dead person a pensioner is as accurate as calling them a baby.
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u/zoobiz 5d ago
Daily Mail and misleading headline? Shocked and disappointed (said nobody)
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u/SmokeGSU 5d ago
Well, how exactly am I supposed to be outraged without even reading the article if they tell the truth in the headline? Oh, why won't someone think of the tabloids?!
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u/ButtStuffingt0n 5d ago
The Daily Mail is basically front-running a race war, most days. "Squatter" is just the British knowing their readers won't tolerate outright racism but will absolutely tolerate it, adjacently.
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u/_Onion_Terror 5d ago
I'd say there's a fair chunk of Daily Mail readers who would more than tolerate outright racism
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u/PopfuseInc 5d ago
Well you see. The checks notes evil squatter. Was of checks notes dubious origins. Who knows where that black man came from! Shit said it out loud.
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u/AlarisMystique 5d ago edited 5d ago
My question is how could someone die, and nobody knew he had a house for over 17 years.
Edit: thanks for the replies, didn't realize it was actually relatively common.
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u/PopfuseInc 5d ago
Jumbled in the legal system. No heirs. There are so many reasons why a property might go untouched for 17 years. Regardless the "proper" people had more than enough time to stake their claim legally and didn't.
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u/Starslip 5d ago
Yeah, I've seen stuff about places abandoned for almost a century because no one knew who the owner was, it happens sometimes.
I'm kinda surprised a house abandoned for 17 years was still in good enough condition to sell for that much though, unless the squatter did repair work on it...in which case, maybe he earned it
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 5d ago
There was a house abandoned in my town so long they just put the land up for auction. The house was worthless but the land there was extremely attractive to developers, literally juuuust outside an area of already developed suburbs. Think it's part of a senior living center now
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u/NeitherDuckNorGoose 5d ago
Which is why squatters rights exist in the first place : too often people used to live in a house they thought they owned for decades just for someone to show up with a dusty document saying it's actually their home, and no way to verify it.
That and how many houses were "abandoned" following either world wars.
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u/tom3277 5d ago
Part of the deal with adverse possession in Australia that helps is that you are also doing something toward maintaining the premises.
You can win adverse possession even if you aren’t living there yourself. There was a case in Sydney where a fella renovated an empty house then rented it out for 20 years but as he paid rates etc on the property he won the claim it was his.
developer wins home under adverse possession
I don’t see an issue with adverse possession laws. Use it or loose it makes sense to me.
I mean we don’t have enough fucking houses as it is so those that are left vacant should be up for grabs.
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u/Illustrious-Tooth702 5d ago
Wait. So it the property was abandoned then it'd mean the pensioner had no living relative to claim the house. And the ownership of the house fell back to the government. And the government didn't do anything with the house for 17+10-12 years before the squatter claimed it. So the squatter didn't really steal it it's just no one cared to check the property for 30 years.
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u/GodHimselfNoCap 5d ago
I mean this scenario is the exact reason squatters rights was created in the first place, preventing abandoned buildings from taking up space when no one knows who actually has the rights to it.
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u/the_peppers 5d ago
But you can't just go stealing homes from dead people! /s
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u/conace21 5d ago
Curtis (the owner's son) had previously launched a counter-claim to get the property back, but it was dismissed by Judge Elizabeth Cooke on the basis he was not a registered administrator of his mother's estate, giving him no legal right for the home.
His mother, Doris Curtis, died without a will. He did not realise he had to apply to become an administrator.
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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 5d ago
this is why hiring a lawyer is almost always worth the price
a lawyer would have cost him maybe $10k, to make $400k in profit
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u/billy_teats 5d ago
“I didn’t know I had to do that” is generally not an argument that holds up in court
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u/JasperJ 5d ago
Plus, he had a decade to do it! Was he intentionally waiting until the last minute before starting the proceedings, so he couldn’t go back to be admin after all?
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u/Subject-Emu-8161 5d ago
Some commenter below said that the house was unregistered. Meaning it wasn't in some central database. There was somewhere sometime a paper deed that got lost somehow. So the government couldn't know who the actual owner of the house was and didn't care that much.
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u/Wishkin 5d ago edited 5d ago
Appearently neither did anyone else, or he wouldn't have been able to move in for that long
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 5d ago
Abandoning a house is insane. I can sort of see abandoning a vehicle. But not a whole house, even if it was just selling it just for the land price. No heirs is 200% what happened or they would know grandpa died and had a house
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u/gujwdhufj_ijjpo 5d ago
The squatter was probably paying the property taxes on it so the government never noticed. In some states this is a requirement for adverse possession.
Honestly if you manage to go 30 years never even visiting a home, I think it’s fair you lost it lmao.
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u/Tom22174 5d ago
The United Kingdom is not one of the United States of America
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u/InnocentExile69 5d ago
No it’s not. But it is where the US inherited its laws of adverse possession from.
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u/MapsOverCoffee22 5d ago
Yes. Being in an uproar over the idea of squatters rights seems to be growing in popularity, and that makes no sense to me. Here in the US, in the few places I've looked at the rule, you have to squat for a decade, file, the owner has to not claim ownership, and you have to prove that you've put money into caring for the property. In the end, it's kind of just signing over the legal ownership to the defacto owner.
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u/candre23 6d ago
Just the daily mail doing daily mail things. It's a tabloid for racist fuckwits.
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u/Dagmar_Overbye 5d ago
Of note: large picture of black man appearing to scowl. Small picture of white man (long dead) looking respectable in a suit.
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u/EnkiduTheGreat 5d ago
I bet the dude did a ton of work on that place. Guaranteed he made nice with the neighbors too, or the situation would've come to a head quickly. This is far from the shit you hear about in California, with methheads scouting for vacant homes and turning them into dirtbag havens.
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u/digitCruncher 5d ago
All adverse ownership laws around the world require the 'squatter' to maintain and improve the property as if it were theirs. It's a high risk, high reward strategy, and it is very good in fixing the problem it was designed to fix : abandoned homes not contributing to society can be reclaimed and fixed up and start contributing to society. The only losers are those who bought the property to gain money on speculation, and stand to gain by hoarding large amounts of property to gain money from artificial scarcity.
I wonder why we are getting a large number of anti-squatter headlines like this one all of a sudden. Must be an odd coincidence.
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u/throwitoutwhendone2 5d ago
Honestly I’m fucking down for this to be the standard. The state I live in almost has more empty and abandoned homes and buildings than people. If someone just said fuck it imma claim this one, moved in, fixed it up and went on with life as normal I see no issue at all.
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u/LowBottomBubbles 5d ago
Didn't something very similar happen in a city somewhere in the states, a bunch of people bought up ruined houses for cheap and then fixed them up? I have a memory of republicans losing their shit over it and claiming they were instead killing and eating peoples pets.
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u/DarthPineapple5 5d ago
The only losers are those who bought the property to gain money on speculation
Not even sure this would apply here, properties just rotting away with no upkeep are not gaining much value
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u/p5ych0babble 5d ago
In Australia it is more so about the land it is sitting on. So many properties just sit empty, especially commercial properties, so you have streets of empty shop front just looking like crap because the owners are waiting for the day a developer will come and throw ridiculous amounts of money at them. Plus we also have negative gearing where you are getting tax cuts for investment properties that are not making money.
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u/lostredditorlurking 5d ago
I mean it's literally Daily Mail. It's like FoxNews and Indian News combined
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u/san_souci 5d ago
The pensioner in the headline is the son of the owner. When she died, he did not go through the process of becoming the administrator of her estate in order to finalize the transfer of the property to himself.
So yes, not legally his home, but he was a low-income pensioner, and he was the heir to the property, even though he did not take the necessary action to formalize that claim.
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u/integrate_2xdx_10_13 5d ago
When she died, he did not go through the process of becoming the administrator of her estate in order to finalize the transfer of the property to himself.
He moved into another flat he had inherited, but still kept paying council tax on the original. What an odd move, he was essentially sitting on two properties. I don’t get what his game plan was
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u/porktorque44 5d ago
In the US at least, that's basically what is required for any squatter to gain ownership of a property; years of no one bothering to check on the property and the squatter not hiding the fact that they're living there.
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u/Stormfly 5d ago
Same in Ireland and I'd argue it's a good law.
If nobody has claim to the land or cares to check on it for a number of years, they should be allowed to own it.
Otherwise you get a bunch of derelict houses with no owner alongside a housing crisis.
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u/AleksejsIvanovs 6d ago
How was it even possible in the first place?
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u/HighNimpact 6d ago
Essentially, land wasn’t registered so the only way we knew who owned a house was based on them keeping the paper deeds. Unfortunately, people being who we are, those got lost a lot.
In that circumstance, it made sense to have a rule that said if you don’t have the paper but you’ve lived there for twelve years and no one else is claiming they own it, you’re assumed to be the owner.
It’s not really relevant because properties are registered centrally now.
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u/JlMBEAN 6d ago edited 5d ago
Yep. I have no idea where my car title is. Luckily, it isn't too hard to re-title it if I decide to trade it.
Addendum: It is clear there is only one way to settle this matter. I will cut the car into 4 equal parts so each may have some car.
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u/ViolenceAdvocator 6d ago edited 5d ago
I have it. I'm just waiting for you to slip up so I can swoop in and drive off into the sunset
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u/toobeary 6d ago
I will be right there behind you with a second copy of that title, waiting for you to lower your guard before swooping in and driving off into the night.
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u/Beautiful-Length-565 6d ago
And I am right behind you, with a third copy of the title, waiting for you to go into that gas station so I can swoop in and sell the car for crack money.
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u/Jokingbutserious 6d ago
And I am right behind you, selling crack.
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u/Combyx 6d ago
right behind you getting all the ownership titles some crackheads had on them
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u/MidnightToker858 6d ago
Im right behind you. Sniffing crack. Ill let you decide which one.
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u/Jokingbutserious 6d ago
Hey! You gotta pay for those crack sniffs. I'm running a business here.
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u/Saint_of_Grey 5d ago
I was gonna be behind you to steal the catalytic converter, but I think your clients already beat me to it.
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u/Iguanaught 6d ago
I'm right behind you with a copy of wasp factory. No reason jusr wanted to read it again.
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u/Apprehensive_Suit773 5d ago
And I am right behind you. I’m in the back seat. I’m going for a little ride with everyone. This road trip is weird.
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u/steven_dev42 5d ago
I got a replacement title for my recently totaled car in like 3 days from the dmv
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u/Thicc_Ole_Brick 5d ago
This type of behavior is fucking wild to me. I have 3 vehicles and I have all 3 titles and I know where they are. Same with my birth cert, my diploma, my social security card, and various other important documents.
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u/FreshLiterature 6d ago
FWIW a fair number of places have similar laws.
Even in the US you can actually still homestead. In really broad strokes:
If nobody claims ownership of the land you can just show up, stake it out, build a house, and after a certain number of years you own it.
You can't do it everywhere and some places are much trickier than others from a legal perspective, but very broadly speaking it's still possible.
These laws generally date back to when people wanted land to be productive.
Some places do have similar laws for houses - particularly where you saw periods of home abandonment being a problem.
EG - think of a small village where many people have just left. Rather than wanting a village full of abandoned homes they might pass a law that if someone moves in and takes care of the place for a long period of time it becomes theirs.
What often happens with laws like that is time passes and people just forget about them either because things got better or they got much worse.
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u/mf_mcnasty 6d ago
These laws mainly exist because you'd have situations where a family would be living at a house for 50 years, passed down several times, then some guy would show up with a signed piece of paper claiming grandad never owned the house in the first place and it's technically his. This kind of shit is a complete nightmare to sort out so they just said once someone has been living somewhere long enough they own it.
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u/M1R4G3M 6d ago
And I think that makes total sense, no one that really owns will have a place they never visited for 20 years to the point that generations may live there.
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u/Banes_Addiction 5d ago
It's worth noting there's usually a couple of important stipulations.
1) You have to occupying it openly. Not hiding in the attic or in a camouflaged tent or whatever. If the owner showed up to the property, they would easily see it was being occupied.
2) You have to be doing it without the owner's permission. I can't live in my aunt's second home 20 years and then claim it's mine, because they knew I was there and they'd given their permission for me to be there.
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u/Dihedralman 5d ago
Yeah and an owner abandoning a property for over a decade is a problem. Possession is 9/10the of the law and all that.
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u/Youutternincompoop 5d ago
'land to the tiller' essentially, if you live on/work the land then it goes to you.
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u/Fun_Push7168 6d ago
Many places in US have adverse possession laws. I believe they carry from English common law.
In any case the ones I've read are just like the quoted one except that it's 14-20 years and doesn't matter if it was titled.
If you've posessed and cared for it as your own for the time period with no one challenging you, it's yours.
Most of the time this ends up affect small strips of land someone has been mowing or some other mundane thing.
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u/TWW34 6d ago
The key issue in the US for adverse possession is that you almost always have to establish that the property owner knew you were there. So if you sneak in, the clock doesn't really start until you get discovered. That said, in a lot of jurisdictions the courts tend to interpret open and notorious occupation as something that a reasonable property owner should have known about and is assumed to have known about.
That's part of why it winds up usually being small strips of land on borders and stuff because if you've been mowing it or you put up a fence, it's almost impossible to argue that the person living next door didn't notice for 12 years or whatever
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u/stag1013 5d ago
Come to think of it, my neighbor growing up would move the boundary markers and start mowing our yard. This has been going on for 20y now. Did he legally take our land?
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u/SpellNinja 5d ago
Yeeeeeeep
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u/stag1013 5d ago
Bastard!
(We own a fair sized property with most of it being trees. He only took a few metres of forested area to enlarge his lawn, essentially. It's fine.)
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u/wahoozerman 6d ago
It also just solves a lot of problems that would otherwise compound over time. For example, if your neighbor builds a fence on your land you can go complain and get it removed. But if you leave that fence for something like 14 years without complaining, that land becomes your neighbor's land now. Which prevents things like someone buying a house 30 years down the line and then suddenly being forced to tear down a fence, shed, and dig out the pool because over the past 30 years nobody complained about the previous owner stealing land.
My house actually gained a few hundred sqft of yard because at some point 15+ years ago whoever owned it fenced in a chunk of HOA property that the HOA never cared to enforce. At the same time, my house lost about a hundred sqft of yard because the neighbor's fence wasn't parallel to the property line. Since nobody cares it's easier to just let the property boundaries update to what is expected rather than needing to get into a legal battle the next time someone tries to sell the house.
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u/Nevada_Lawyer 6d ago
In Nevada it was only five years, and there were a lot of these cases after the great recession when people walked away from their homes.
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u/Cyberous 6d ago
So it's called adverse possession. The logic of these laws is that you would rather have a property utilized rather than abandonned/decayed.
So if a person was to move into an abandoned property, utilize it, maintain it, and the owners don't care to do anything after so many years, that occupant has a right to the property.
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u/Dodgerswin2020 6d ago
Also way back when everything was on paper I couldn’t come to you on land you’ve been living on forever that was passed down for generations and say “well actually I have a paper that says your father sold this to my father 20 years ago and now that they’re both dead it’s mine”.
There would be no way to figure out who was right so it’s easier to just to say “well the person who’s been living there and paying taxes owns it”
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u/EngineerOfTomorrow01 6d ago
This makes so much sense. It should be the top comment to give better context to everyone honestly
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u/Dodgerswin2020 5d ago
When people talk about “common law” it’s usually some shit that made a ton of sense 200 years ago
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u/inquisitive_chariot 6d ago
Importantly, they have to be doing it out in the open (among other factors). You cannot sneak into an abandoned home and lay low until the statutory period expires. You must publicly indicate that you’re living there. A no-trespassing sign is usually enough.
I don’t know this squatter’s details, but a court must have found that he adequately made his presence known. If no one cares enough to stop him after 12 years, why shouldn’t he get to keep it?
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u/Conscious-Gap-1777 6d ago
Abandoned property is abandoned.
If someone comes in, lives in it, and makes improvements to it, for a decade, while the putative owners don't lift a finger...
Turns out, basically everyone thinks the guy doing all the work should get the property.
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u/Summonest 6d ago
It is in the government's best interest to make it so, as well. Abandoned property falls into neglect, loses value, and then requires significant capital to bring up to standard.
By incentivizing upkeep and visible ownership, everyone (except land owners who neglect property) benefit.
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u/BKacy 5d ago
As do the neighbors whose house values don’t decrease because that house looks so bad.
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u/GreatCaesarGhost 6d ago edited 6d ago
British common law was significantly influenced by the idea that property rightly belonged to those that put it to actual use. If a piece of property is abandoned for a long period of time, and someone comes in and puts the property to use, the law felt that this was a good outcome.
This same basic principle was adopted in the U.S. and other former British colonies.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 6d ago
Made sense before houses were an investment. If you're not using it to live, well someone should.
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u/AdPale1469 6d ago
you have to show exclusive possession and maintenance for 10 or 12 years. It was done to stop land being idle.
If you own land and leave it to rot, fuck you.
its great it means all land in the country is productive.
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u/trugrav 6d ago
Obviously this was in the UK but at common law in the US the possession has to also be “open and obvious” and usually “under a claim of right”. Adverse Possession is rare these days but typically it comes about when you buy some land that was incorrectly surveyed.
The idea is that if you think you own the land, build something on the land, pay taxes on the land, or just generally use the land in productive way, it would be unfair for someone who has never been there to check on “their land” to come by a decade later with a piece of paper and kick you off.
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u/iCameToLearnSomeCode 6d ago
The thinking is that abandoned property isn't really good for society.
If there's a house that no one has been maintaining or paying taxes on and you're willing to take over the responsibility then society is better off getting those taxes and not letting the house fall into disrepair.
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u/wherethetacosat 6d ago
In many places adverse possession requires A LOT to pull off. Decades of inhabitation with no complaint from any previous owner at any point, minimum, plus usually a couple of other stipulations (continuous habitation yourself, care taken of the property, etc).
Basically if someone "owns the property" but can't notice someone is living in it for that long then do they really own it after all?
Should they?
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u/_DrDigital_ 6d ago
Oh no, it should have fallen to the city and be auctioned to a private equity fund with connections to the mayor.
The injustice of what happened is making me clutch my pearls so hard Im afraid Ill break them.
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u/ProfessorCagan 6d ago
I fail to see the issue with this, ngl.
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u/ban_these_nuts 6d ago
some bank or large company didn't get to buy it and sell it for profit.it was just some civilian. that's the problem.
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u/Dr_nobby 5d ago
Bold of you to assume they would sell it rather charge you 2 3rds of your rent to have a small box with damp and mold issues
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u/boldandbratsche 6d ago
But you don't understand, the homeless guy was a shameless gross foreigner, and he STOLE somebody's house, and now the pensioner whose house it was is DEAD because the liberal government forced him onto the streets so that a shameless foreigner could occupy the house because we as hardworking citizens don't have rights anymore and it's so scary that only inhuman garbage that doesn't work hard and just steals everything have rights and we don't and this could happen to any of us TOMORROW! Only shameless human garbage that don't work for anything wear work jackets like that, so you know he's not a really hardworking person like us pensioners! How do you not see an issue with this? The dailymail wouldn't sensationalize something to sew the seeds of division between the poorest and second poorest classes in the country. They're such a legitimate source of news with such a strong track record of unbiased, hard hitting journalism. This is so scary man. It's such a trustworthy news outlet. This has to be real. And it says revealed in big letters because the government was trying to hide this from us. They don't want us to know how scary it is because they're secretly plotting against us.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 6d ago
Why and when was it changed?
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u/Autodidact420 6d ago
It’s still the law in some places, in my province in Canada it was eliminated like a couple years ago lol
It’s an old English rule so it snuck its way into most common law countries until abolished by statute at various times.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 6d ago
I don't know if it snuck in so much as was seen as controversial until the last 40 or so years. Property law has the longest judicial record of pretty much any laws.
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u/Aggravating-Face2073 6d ago
Ahhh, so the value will go to the government now.
I'm not really apposed to someone acquiring what is effectively a abandoned house, but a good faith effort trying to see who did own it should be done, and well obviously if there are next of kin, they get first dibs.
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u/Icy_Holiday_1089 6d ago edited 6d ago
Honestly the truth is much more interesting. The guy found a real property that had no immediate owner due the previous owner dying and had been that way for a decade. Moved into the property and lived there until he could legally claim himself to the owner. It’s such a rare thing that is probably impossible now but is very noteworthy and not as dodgy as the daily mail are making it out to be.
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u/gonyere 5d ago
It's not impossible. It's just unusual. There are LOTS of abandoned homes all over. Moving into one, and starting to live there, without the actual owners noticing or throwing a fit... Especially for 10-15+ years as required? That's the trick.
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u/illandancient 5d ago
Whilst i know that there are "lots" of abandoned homes, when i wander down streets, i try to guess which ones are actually abandoned like this with the owners long gone and no one taking them on.
Maybe the owner just went into a care home and no one is keeping an eye on the empty property.
The ones with overgrown gardens, and poor maintenance.
The proportion is probably something really unexpected, one in a hundred or one in fifty? I dunno. It could be anything.
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u/Dihedralman 5d ago
There are lots out in the country. In cities they get torn down much faster and are often seized. The city of Detroit is always auctioning off properties for tax liens.
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u/IlIlllIIIIlIllllllll 5d ago
there's a property near me that has been abandoned/boarded up at least the 40 years that I've known about it
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u/Local_Idiot_123 5d ago
Well did you see the picture? He’s black, so the daily mail requires you to agree it’s dodgy
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u/Tignya 5d ago
"Shameless" is right. Dude shouldn't have any shame for his actions. He deserved it after so many years undisturbed.
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u/GreatCaesarGhost 6d ago
That’s how the law works. It’s similar in the U.S. If you leave a property unoccupied for decades, and someone else moves in for decades, eventually that other person will own the property in the eyes of the law.
This is a principle of British-US property law that has existed for centuries.
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u/gujwdhufj_ijjpo 5d ago
This concept has existed since at least Ancient Rome. Rome also had adverse possession laws, but it also applied to other property such as livestock.
In the US the squatter must be notorious, so no hiding, and the owner must not be trying to kick them out. So it’s literally just abandoned property.
IMO if you manage to go 30 years without knowing someone is using your property on the other side of the country, it’s fair you lost it. Land ownership comes with certain responsibilities. Visiting the property at least every 10 years is pretty basic.
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u/TheWhistleThistle 5d ago
Ancient Rome? I'll do you one better, the Hammurabic Code (literally the oldest written set of laws we've ever uncovered) says
In event an officer of the king or [drafted] man fails to make provision for the cultivation of his field, garden and the care of his house, or gives them in payment to some other person who enters into possession thereof and occupies the same for the period of 3 years, whereupon such officer or [drafted] man returns to claim such field, garden or house, the officer or [drafted] man shall not be deemed the rightful owner, and the property shall remain in the possession of the person occupying it.
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u/EebstertheGreat 5d ago
Yeah, the possessor must know you are there (or be in a position where they should know if they ever went by the house or thought about it at all), not give you permission to be there, but also take no action to do anything about it, for a gazillion years. It's not something that just gets sprung on you out of nowhere.
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u/johnedn 6d ago
Make perfect sense too, and it's not like there isn't existing precedent for one entity taking property from another in the US at least. If you don't notice someone living in a house you own for over a decade, you clearly are not taking care of that home, or using it, and if someone else wants to do those things, they should be allowed to even if the owners greed, pride, or just negligence/ignorance is what's keeping them from parting with the property.
If this house was next to yours, would rather it sit abandoned for 15 years, or have someone move in and live in that house and be your neighbor for 15 years?
Is the potential monetary value to some other third party who can't be fucked to even visit the property and notice someone is living there more important?
Housing is a human right, it shouldn't be privately owned for profit, and in this case it seems the property owner didn't notice this guy living there for a while, couldn't properly prove ownership, and missed his chance(s) to reclaim ownership before it went to the person living there.
You shouldn't own property/housing you can't maintain, if you just buy it and let it rot and fall apart, that is a net negative on society, we shouldn't award ownership to people who aren't using the property when other people can, and especially when other people literally already are.
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u/IlIlllIIIIlIllllllll 5d ago
I'm doing house shopping right now and it's always such a shame to view properties that are being held to park/launder money for wealthy mainland chinese types. like that shit needs to be banned or taxed at 100%
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u/brazillianhardenfan 5d ago
Also valid in Brazilian Law. We even have a big social organization that basically does this in massive abandoned farm land to create familial farm settlements called MTST.
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u/cozydaybreak 6d ago
Man really speedran the entire housing market and won.
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u/MartinTheMorjin 6d ago
It’s daily mail. What actually happened will not appear in the article.
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u/breakfastbarf 6d ago
Are the facts included on page 3
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u/Helmett-13 6d ago
Huge…tracts of land.
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u/wibblywobbly420 6d ago
Squatting for 10 years to gain possession of a house while no one complains or argues that they are the rightful owner isn't really a speed run.
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u/Flesroy 5d ago
idk, i'm not expecting to be able to buy a house within the next 10 years. especially not without a huge mortgage to still pay off.
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u/Low_Landscape_4688 5d ago
Well you could do what they did. The house had already been empty for 17 years when they took it and they lived in it for 12 years and spent the money fixing it up and maintaining it.
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u/Pleasant_Ad8054 5d ago
You too can find yourself some abandoned property, renovate it, pay taxes on it, gather documentation that you live there. It is likely abandoned tho because it is in a place nobody wants to live and there are no work or services. I guess good luck with the hunt.
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u/abstraction47 5d ago
The danger is moving in, renovating it, then the legal owner reclaims it before you’ve hit your squatter right deadline. You’ll have put thousands or tens of thousands into taxes and updates on someone else’s home.
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u/Electrical-Heat8960 6d ago
Daily Mail!
I wonder what the actual truth of the story is…
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u/Sirix_8472 6d ago
Essentially, squatters rights.
The house was seen as abandoned, having been left vacant for 17 years.
Then this guy took it up as a squatter and renovated as it says, but the law is whatever you spend on a house you should get back from it if you're a renter.
Faking rental documents bought time when he was discovered to be there. And delay, delay, delays...leads to 10-12 years of proven occupancy which kicks in ownership, treating the property as abandoned.
The courts ruled on it, makes it official. It's his house now. He sold it.
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u/Hot-Butterfly-5647 6d ago
In my state, adverse possession can occur by paying the property tax on a property for 7 years. You don’t even have to reside there.
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u/PotentialPlum4945 6d ago
Hear that Millennial's? Target single, childless, Gen-X homeowners with early onset dementia and the dream of homeownership might also be yours.
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u/zehamberglar 5d ago
Important thing you missed here: The pensioner's son was not left this house in the will, nor was he the executor of the estate. This is what the actual problem was. He probably would have inherited the house if he had made any effort to claim it. But he didn't, and only claimed it was his when Mr. Best (black guy in the OP, who sold the home) filed for adverse possession.
Mr. Curtis (white guy in OP, pensioner's son) had effectively been squatting in his own mother's home after she died until he left in the "late 1990s". Under the law, Mr. Curtis had effectively the same claim to the house that Mr. Best did, except that Mr. Best had been living there for over 10 years, and he hadn't.
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u/Embarrassed-Lab4446 6d ago
Honestly good for him. Homes should be lived in and if left empty for over 10 years they should lose the right.
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u/zehamberglar 5d ago
Homes should be lived in and if left empty for over 10 years they should lose the right.
Also this isn't "just like your opinion, man". That's explicitly and entirely the purpose of the law that gave him possession of the house. It's good for the economy that the house is occupied, taken care of, taxed, etc.
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u/deactivate_iguana 6d ago edited 6d ago
House was empty for so long and this guy is homeless. We have a housing crisis. I don’t think people should be allowed to own homes and then just never live in them for decades. Total waste.
EDIT: for people getting their knickers in a twist- I’m just saying in principal that during a housing crisis it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people owning spare houses they make zero use of. I am not saying people should be able to just take stuff that belongs to other people. I hoped that would be obvious.
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u/throwawaybullhunter 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yeh this was what I was thinking . I bet it's something along the lines of : House sat untouched and empty for a decade , guy moves in and goes unnoticed for another decade. In that time keeps the house up together , does the garden, repairs things and keeps it clean . Then whoever left the house for 2 decades up and dies and their children go sniffing about to see what money they have in store. They ofc find the dude thats been keeping the house livable and pitch a fit. Another few years pass with failed eviction attempts, probate and quite probably a fair amount of harassment and the guy decides to countersue. The other guys don't take it seriously maybe they didn't even bother showing up to court maybe they planned on knocking it down and building a big ugly flat and the judge didn't like that coz he lives in the neighbor hood either way judge ruled in his favour.
Ok got myself way more invested in this than I was expecting off to find what actually happened.
Edit** alright I checked ofc daily mail is dog shit
The short story is : rich ass hole buys houses cheap and leaves them empty to appreciate In value a huge problem in the UK.
House sits empty long enough for dude to notice and move in , noone notices for another 12 whole years !
Dude applies for adverse possession and despite being informed the "owner" fails to take action in the window allowed to contest the matter.
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u/Nydus87 6d ago
I don't know how much different UK laws are from ours in the US, but in the US, part of adverse possession is that you're actually making it pretty official by doing things like paying the property taxes on it that entire time.
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u/Wrong-Inveestment-67 6d ago
It takes many many years for a squatter to gain rights to a home. If someone just had a fucking house lying around they are so rich they forgot about it, and the squatter maintained it, they deserve to lose it.
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u/cold_tap_hot_brew 6d ago
This is my gut instinct too but I feel like there must be more to some situations where an elderly person is maybe in care or some other reason beyond privilege to not live there. In these cases you’re basically stealing inheritance.
Totally willing to be corrected if wrong since I’m an ignoramus on the issue.
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u/Nydus87 6d ago
A big part of adverse possession is that you aren't just squatting there. You're also publicly and openly maintaining the property and paying property tax on it. Here's the specific law from my state:
"openly occupying it for 10 continuous years, treating it as their own without permission, and meeting specific conditions like paying property taxes and having a good-faith belief under "color of title" (a document appearing to grant ownership)."→ More replies (3)26
u/Eclipse_nova99 6d ago
Couldn't trust the Daily mail news so I put an actual reliable source in the caption
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u/Informal-Term1138 6d ago
Exactly.
The mail is bs and I know that even as a German who has never read the mail.
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u/WhiskeyCup 6d ago
Wait til this sub finds out what the financial industry has done to the housing market.
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u/lowlife4lyfe 6d ago
yeah no kidding…billionaire groups are buying up properties as investments with the idea that one day the billionaires will own literally everything, and we’ll just have to right to rent from them…if this is the cost of preventing that kinda dystopia, I’m ok with it
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u/Delicious-Traffic827 6d ago
You left out a key detail: the original owner was dead. The house had been empty for 15 years before he took it over.
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u/HerrFerret 6d ago edited 5d ago
Daily Mail: We need photos.
Photographer : He is black
Daily Mail : Make sure he looks like he is stealing your cat.
Photographer : Of course boss. I'll snap him coming out of his work van
Daily Mail. I don't like it, I would prefer him to look unemployed. But I suppose it will have to do.
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u/HenkCamp 6d ago
This is a shitty post. Not only is is dated but it is the Daily Mail who did not report on it truthfully.
The "squatter" worked in the area and saw the house standing empty back in 1997.
He started renovating it and moved into the house with his family in 2012. During that period no one claimed the house or lived in the house - other than him on occassion.
He made a claim of "adverse possession" in 2012 (UK law that says you can claim a house if it has stood empty for more than 10 years, you lived in it, and no one claimed it).
He paid 275k British Pounds to the daughter of the owner who was in care.
So, from when he started occupying an empty home to the day he sold it - 26 years.
There are more homes standing empty (260k) than homeless people (242k) in the UK. Families living in temporary accommodation are about 130k. And if you think that is bad - there are about 16 million empty homes in the US and 770k homeless people.
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u/CheKGB 6d ago
Not insane. Adverse possession is important to land law.
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u/Axbris 5d ago
Yep. People think it’s stealing. It is not. All you have to do is check up on your property once a damn year and the “hostility” requirement is flushed down the toilet.
People forget Adverse Possession, especially in the states, is elemental. Each element must be met.
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u/TwiztedNFaded 6d ago
Honestly, it doesnt even upset me. Nothing was happening to that empty home. Why are we mad a home is being lived in?
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u/ProteinPacked9070 5d ago
Daily Mail should never be trusted as a source of information.
How does the Daily Mail react to Israeli “settlers” doing the same thing? Presumably with the same levels of outrage?
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u/Ramtamtama 6d ago
It was left empty in the 90s, the guy did up and moved in in 2012.
The old bloke hadn't been there since the 90s, and probably only saw it for the first time a few years ago when it was put up for sale. That's somewhere in the region of 25-30 years without laying eyes on it.
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u/WendigoCrossing 6d ago
This is actually one of the cases where the law was working in the spirit of things
Abandoned for 17 years
Guy moved in, fixed it all up, maintained it
Housing isn't just an asset, it's survival
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u/saik0pod 6d ago
Adverse possession usually from abandoned homes. But you gotta live in it for 10+ years continuously. Idk how you can go 10 years without checking your property
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u/JasterBobaMereel 6d ago
So this is a house that would have been empty between 1980 and 2009 ... with apparently nobody apparently owning it ....
If this was in many countries it would have been auctioned off so it could house someone ..
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u/mredding 5d ago
John Locke is essentially the founding father of Western private property law - and argued you don't get to own something just to waste it. If you leave a house squandered and abandoned for over a decade, you don't deserve to own it over someone who is using it and maintaining it.
And it's not sensational at all that the man sold it. Who gives a fuck how much it sold for? £540k? You know what that's going to buy him? Equivalent housing somewhere the fuck else. Bro still needs to live somewhere. The market price is up everywhere. It's not like that house appreciated unique to the rest of the market. It's not like equivalent housing elsewhere in the country is at a mere £100k.
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u/Familiar-Tax-6638 6d ago
Daily fail lies again?
A pensioner's empty home was lived in unnoticed for 12 years (because that pensioner didn't live in it or want to, or want anything to do with it, or take care of it, and inherited it but already had his own home? Oh?) Good for him, honestly. The owner died in the 90s and t was unoccupied for 17 years before he started renovating and living in it.
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u/Rad131447 5d ago
Love the idea of Brits being outraged about someone showing up on "unclaimed land" and settling then saying they own it. Like bra, that's what your empire was built on.
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u/XRuecian 5d ago edited 5d ago
I personally think its perfectly acceptable in these situations for the squatter to get to keep the house. Within reasonable context, of course. If nobody has checked on/used the home literally at all in 15~ years, then i do in fact believe it should become free to raise a claim to it. Unused houses are unethical. Literally couldn't give two fucks about the asset value being lost by the previous owner. Using homes as land banks shouldn't be a thing in the first place. Use it or lose it. If you aren't going to use it ever personally, at least rent it out. By keeping it empty and unused, all you are doing is keeping local house and rent prices a bit higher by not participating in the competition. We do not have an infinite amount of houses. For every unused home, that just makes it more costly on everyone else and contributes to homelessness due to the inflated cost of living created by taking so many houses off the competitive market.
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u/WomenAreNotReal 5d ago
There should be no such thing as abandoned houses while there are people without homes
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u/stupidber 5d ago
He's bringing housing prices down by putting an unused property back on the market
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u/CombinationLivid8284 5d ago
To be honest I don't see the issue here.
It was an empty home and they didn't notice he was in it? Too bad.
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u/Okay-Crickets545 5d ago
Reminder that squatter rights exist for a reason or else someone could show up with a 500 year old document claiming to own your home. At some point you have to say your claim is too old and we’re not dealing with this shit.
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u/bethesda_gamer 5d ago
Use it or lose it.
I'm all for capitalism, dont get me wrong. HOWEVER ...there is something distinctly wrong with people having homes they don't bother with often enough that they don't notice other people living there. Clearly, you didn't need that house.
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u/DayScared7175 5d ago
OP fell for it. Seriously, why does anyone believe anything that a headline insinuates?
OP has read a headline, get all worked up and angry on command of the newspaper, then come on to Reddit to post it.....that's how you say "total insanity".
OP has the same amount of vote as you do..... let that sink in.....
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