How a Trespasser Can Come to Own Your Property Legally - Lehto's Law Ep. 5.67

hello welcome what's gonna Latos law I'm Steve Leto today we're to talk about how a trespasser can legally take possession of your property a trespasser can legally take possession of your property and of course I'm talking about a thing called adverse possession it's popped up in the news lately often by people who are doing it wrong but people have heard that there's this concept out there called adverse possession where if you take possession of someone else's property in the right way for a period of time it can become yours and you don't have to pay for it but the problem of course is that people in the news who go and squat and somebody is 2.5 million dollar home because it happens to be empty at the moment it doesn't work that easily but generally speaking what we're talking about is a real concept that can work and it can work for you or against you depending on which side of the property line you're on so in case you don't know what I'm talking about imagine a situation where you want a piece of property your neighbor owns a piece of property and there's no dotted line down in the middle between whose property line is which and you've lived there for many many years and they've lived there for many many years and and summer long lines somebody builds a fence down that property line and they build it in a sloppy fashion and it's three feet off it's three feet off one direction or the other if nobody catches that depending on what state you're in after a certain period of time there's a very good chance that that fence will become the new property line and whoever's favored as its in will simply get that new piece of property for free by adverse possession and so in Michigan it's 15 years some states it's shorter at common law I believe it was 20 and this concept does go back to England and that you know that's where we get a lot of these common law things from but the thinking was that if there's a piece of property that's someplace and somebody is using it and they meet these certain criteria and they're doing it in such a way they meet these criteria that they acting like the owner after after certain times they become the owner and and their title becomes the good title and the previous owner it's gone as far as ownership goes so what we're talking about advert possession it's a legal concept that allows someone who is in essence a trespasser to gain legal title over the land of somebody else's after a period of time and certain conditions are met it's one of those things that I guess said a lot of people get upset when they hear about it especially what happens to them but it's also areas a lot of confusion and so um in Michigan and again I'm not gonna go out over all 50 states property laws by state are one of those areas of law that vary wildly and so I couldn't begin to go over each state on this but just to let you know the elements that become adverse possession are generally similar from state to state the main thing that changes is the length of time within which you must be adversely possessing a property for to become yours the interesting thing about this is that once you meet these requirements and you're the adverse possessor the land becomes yours so let's go with the example that you have a piece of property and the property line you always thought it was here they always thought it was there somebody builds a fence down that line and 16 years later you survey the property and you discover the defense is 3 feets the wrong side ok and it it's 3 feet onto your property which means you're about to lose 3 feet of property ok now here's the thing you can go to court and bring what's called a quiet title action that's where you're gonna try to quiet the title you're trying to remove any disputes regarding the title you should try to settle the title but it's called a quiet title action and in Michigan if that person has adversely possessed that strip of property for 15 years and you bring the quiet title action if they can prove the following things that property becomes theirs and the court will say so and that is how it goes down so the first thing is that there's several elements that the person is claiming by adverse possession that they've got to meet and one of them is that their possession and and in use of the property was hostile meaning that they they treated it in a way that was contrary to the other person owning it so in other words hostile here hasn't talked you know the hostilities between people it's just simply like if somebody were to go buy a Golgi who owns a piece of property well I don't know something it's on that guy's side of the fence and he maintains it mows it takes care of it and and you know it's pretty clear as if you had to guess between who owns that you go well the fence is here that guy does that's that's that's hostile ownership he's got to or she's got to have you know actual use of the property and that means that they're actually doing things and acting like they own the property so most of these things would put someone on notice that the property in question is being disputed in other words if you put the fence three feet on the my side and I know it I'm not gonna leave the fence there I'm gonna go over there one day and say hey dude you put a fence on my property you better remove it fast and not not damage my lawn in the removal process or I'm gonna remove it and I'm gonna charge you for removing it okay so so that's one and then exclusive use so it's got to be a situation where there's no question who's using the property okay the other guys using the property he put the fence down there and and on my sense he's using that property's actual use and it's exclusive use in other words no analysis using that property between him and me it turns up just him that he's excluded me from the property I think technically that's what exclusive comes from the same root word the phrase open and notorious refers to the fact that the person is openly using the property it's not hidden they don't sneak after at midnight and step on it and run back inside their house okay they're using the house or the property open and notoriously and and that is it one of the other elements you often hear about and then it must be a continuous use so the description I give of a fence being built in the wrong side of the pop property line that's a pretty straightforward example to think of but there are other situations that arise and they often arise in really really strange ways and one of the ways they arise is when homes change your properties change ownership and a new owner comes in and things aren't clearly mark and you start thinking about yourself well is my property line here or is it here or is it here and there have been examples for instance where somebody moves into a piece of property and their neighbor has a driveway running down the edge of it and unbeknownst to the new owner that driveway is over the property line and the previous owner didn't catch it or didn't care and the new owner moves and it goes oh well it's always been there I assume that's where it belonged and if they get to the point where that driveways been there long enough then they're openly using it it's clearly you know to their advantage it they're the only ones using that driveway for their purposes it's opening the tourists after the statutory period runs the ground you know that that driveway area the ground beneath the directly becomes the property of those people simply because they've been using it in that way under adverse possession simply does it depends on how long the time period is in that state like I said Michigan's 15 years some states are 20 and some are shorter I've heard of some as short as I think seven maybe even shorter than that I don't know 50 states out there it's a big world the other thing to notice about this and to think about this so you think okay I own a piece of property I could walk my piece of property I actually live on an acre of property but I can tell you right now there are there's a fence down one side and there's a tree line down the other and I'm pretty certain that those are the property lines okay I should probably go look right but I've lived on pieces of property before where there were gray areas and and what's interesting about this is I sold a house once and between me and my neighbor was a split rail fence and I saw the property description and the property description clearly said the split rail fence was on my side of the property line about ten feet there's no question it was but I knew the guy who lived next door is very very nice guy he's actually got built my house he and then he moved out and built the house next door and then he lived there very nice old guy and one day he came over to talk to me and we were talking and I said where'd that split-rail fence come from and he goes you know I because I put that up before I built my second house he was at one point when I owned this whole piece of property right he goes I put the split-rail fence up as just a decorative thing it's not an actual fence and and so while we were talking about this he goes so you know there's there's a pear tree apple trees are one thing pear trees are another is a pear tree and every summer when the pears fell the ground that get crushed and bees would come from counties around to do whatever they do with rotting fruit and so all I remember is there's this hazard of bees around the bottom of the pear tree but we used to joke about it because I would mow that section of the lawn over there but he and I discussed it and and you know there's no debate about that being my property now the interesting thing is that when I sold the house we had an open house and a bunch of Realtors came by and I liked Realtors and I was walking around with the Realtors and they were looking at the piece of paper that showed where the property lines were and so on and I said by the way guys that split rail fence is not the property on the go I own ten feet beyond it and one of the Realtors looks means no you don't know you know and I looked at her and I said yes I do and he goes no no because that that fence looks more more than 15 years old he goes you've lost that property due to adverse possession it's really weird you go to law school these excuse me sounds Kris where'd you go to law school and he goes I'm not a lawyer oh okay I said um you're a realtor right he goes yeah I'm not a realtor he goes oh okay cool I go I'm aware and he goes okay I go so you think the presence of a decorative fence that both owners are ignoring is automatically that I'm gonna lose the property to that guy well I don't know let's discuss this you told me I was wrong exactly right so I mean he walked away from me and generally speaking simply mowing the lawn won't get you somebody else's property but it certainly would indicate that I was treating it like as my own but again you know there's other things going on there but but the point is so I'll give you an example and and and I was poking around for good examples of adverse possession on the internet and I founded this out of Missouri that describes a fairly typical dispute between neighbors neither had any knowledge of the true location of a record line until a survey was performed in 2010 the one owner had been using the disputed area since approximately 1980 that's 30 years in a state with a 10-year statute of limitations the final argument discussed by the court concerns statements made by the owner in a 1992 administrative hearing regarding the location of the property line the defendants argued that that one person was prevented from benefiting from any actions prior to those statements and the court disagreed and said once titled the property vests in the adverse possessor any conduct subsequent thereto is irrelevant to adverse possession once the ten-year period does 10 years that state has run the possessor is vested with title and the record owner is divested meaning that if the adverse possession statute in your state and like I said in Michigan is 15 years if that neighbor of mine put that fence there and it was there for 15 years and then in the sixteenth year I said you know something I I dispute this and I take it to court and I go well courts never give it to you the courts gonna go we didn't have to give it to him he gained title by adverse possession all the courts gonna do is confirm it or not confirm it and the court would then confirm it the quiet title action so the case that has told you about the defendant began adversely possessing the disputed area in 1979 when he moved in and began to maintain it his adverse possession was complete in 1989 10 years later which was in that state and at that point he was vested legal title and the property to the South was divested any representations that respondent may have made during an administrative hearing later after he had already acquired title are irrelevant so in other words even if he didn't believe he owned it which apparently he didn't doesn't matter so the weird thing is that in Michigan has tons of case law on this is kind of vary wildly by what type of property you're dealing with what the use wasn't so on it doesn't even matter if that person is trying to take the property they don't need to know it's not their property it doesn't matter the fact the matter is simply that they are somehow possessing the property in a way that's hostile to your ownership its actual they're actually doing it it's exclusive meaning they're using it you're not open and notorious meaning they're not hiding it they're not saying you know no we're not doing they're using like stairs and it's continuous to the entire period of time there are a couple other wacky exceptions to this so for instance there have been examples where somebody was paying taxes on land and said well doesn't that establish my right to ownership and you're paying taxes on it among other things is between you and the taxpayer or the taxman right unless you're putting up signs going I'm paying taxes on this piece of property who would know also you can't claim adverse possession against the government and this is actually one that I became aware of when a relative of mine owned a piece of property that was adjacent to municipal yone piece of property up north in Michigan and there was a well-known boundary line that ran right down the middle where everyone knew where it was and my friend planted some trees along the boundary line because the other side was a park and there were people in this park who would occasionally be very very loud and so on and it was right next to his house and he thought well I'm gonna plant these trees and the trees will grow up and eventually will will act as some kind of sound deadener possibly or just block the view of the people from the park and the people who the municipality came by and they said hey you know those trees are awfully close to our property line and my friend said so what and they said well we don't like the idea about you planting trees so close to the property line and he said again it's my property number one but number two again why who cares what's what what harm could it possibly be that I planted these trees and one of the knuckleheads on the council or the mother that ran the municipality said well we don't want you to try to claiming that by adverse possession and my acquaintances who was an attorney said that's impossible I can't you can't get adverse possession against the government because the government is always presumed to be using and owning its own land because it's doing that the trust for everyone and as you can imagine there's state lands state forests all over the place if you could get adverse possession against the government you just run at the middle of Hiawatha National Forest stake out ten acres and go out there once a year and claim it as your own and after 15 years it'd be yours and you'd say hey no one stopped me so as idiotic as that is you cannot get adverse possession against the government for that reason strangely the people on the council up north didn't believe that even after my friend showed them the laws that said that and they removed the trees another story altogether uh so when you see people on the news who say yeah I found this house it was abandoned I moved into it and claiming it by adverse possession the biggest problem with that is that in most states adverse possessions measured in years not minutes so when you find an abandoned house if you actually find such a thing the idea that you can break into it when someone else claims ownership and then say I'm claiming it by adverse possession how long have you been there a day two days if you're there for 15 years in Michigan yeah I'll grant you adverse possession of course in the ensuing 15 years you got to live there open and notoriously and you've got to exclude others and you've got to unstuff legally by the way so when the true owner shows up and says hey get out of my house you cannot keep them out by adverse possession because that's the whole point is that until you hit the 15 year markets not yours it's not yours so there was a wave of these in the news shortly after the recession 2008 2009 type an adverse possession house and you'll get millions of these literally and they're all over where people are just be driving on a street and there's these multi-million dollar homes where the owners of the left and just walked away from mortgages Hey and people juvinity it by adverse possession and they'd file documents with the court saying I'm claiming by adverse possession and courts will accept anything for finally I've talked about that before just as they accepted it doesn't make it real and the real thing is that you'd have to bring a quiet title action at the end of the time period and then it's yours by adverse possession but prior to hitting that 15 year mark in Michigan or twenty year mark in the common-law States 10-year mark in Missouri or whatever it might be in your state until that moment in time it's not yours and that's very very clear so adverse possession is a real thing under certain circumstances a trespasser can end up owning property that was not theirs to begin with because that's the point they're trespassing on that property for so long that the courts say you know something at this point it becomes theirs if it was so important to you you would have figured it out the fifteen years since they've been trespassing on it so that's adverse possession that's how you can lose your property to a trespasser but like I said the people in the news doing it the houses ain't gonna work otherwise questions are comments always fire my way doctor bye

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 214,975

Rating: 4.9101663 out of 5

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer

Id: fjvOFCU-WII

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019