Could You Buy a House for $16?

There was a story last week that I caught on MSN about a man in West Texas who bought a gem of a house for only $16! Now, you might think that this house is one of those that is only held up by a couple of boards or by a hundred thousand termites all holding hands to keep the house up, but no, it looks like a pretty nice home (valued at $300,000) on a very nice street. So, Could YOU Buy a House for $16?

Could you buy a Costa Mesa house for $16?

The next question is how in the world could this guy buy a house for $16, and the natural follow up question is how do I buy a house in Costa Mesa for $16? 😉

There is a little known law regarding property that is called “adverse possession“, and allows an individual to take over abandoned property so long as the individual follows the proper procedures and filing. The Texas man did his research on the law, recognized that the property he was interested in was abandoned, somehow had key to the property (yeah, right!), and filed paperwork with the county for $16 to make him the legal owner. There is a mortgage company who had a mortgage lien on the property, but apparently they went out of business.

The short answer is yes, but it really is not as easy as the guy from West Texas makes it look. First of all, even though that mortgage company went out of business, they will more than likely sell their interests in property to another company through their closure, and believe me, another company will be knocking on that gentleman’s door in time. Adverse possession is tricky- generally, the person (called a disseisor) must openly occupy the property exclusively, keeping out others, and use it as if it were his own. The most common form of adverse possession might occur with a surveying error.

 

Generally, the openly hostile possession must be continual (although not necessarily continuous or constant) without challenge or permission from the lawful owner, for a fixed statutory period to acquire title. Where the property is of a type ordinarily occupied only during certain times (such as a summer cottage), the disseisor may need to have only exclusive, open, and hostile possession during those successive useful periods, making the same use of the property as an owner would for the required number of years. Bad news for those thinking about this in Costa Mesa real estate – you have to pay the property taxes and it might take you as long as 20 years to truly become the owner of the property! However, that might beat the other ways to save money on your Costa Mesa real estate taxes as we covered last week!

Good luck! More info about the Texas guy can be found at Candy’s Dirt blog, photo courtesy of Candy.

If you need help with anything related to Costa Mesa real estate, feel free to call Colin Delaney at (714) 743-9882 or via e-mail.