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Health & Fitness

Buyers and Sellers Beware of Squatters

My clients are in the middle of a terrible nightmare of a situation. The property they are in contract to buy has a squatter currently occupying it.

It is a short sale and after the owners moved out (and while the short sale was in the process of being approved) squatters moved into the property. If you haven’t already heard, squatting in property has become a huge problem. There is even a Wikihow page titled, “How to Squat in Abandoned Property.”

An upsetting new breed of trespassers and con artists are moving into vacant distressed properties across the country and in our area. These people are not derelict and living on the streets, and they don't move on once discovered by police or sheriff’s officers.

When we called the police about the squatters in my client’s house the squatters showed a forged lease agreement between themselves and a real estate agent in the area. We found this is one of the more common scams.

Squatting schemes can take a few different forms. In some, individuals will gain access to a lockbox code on a property, open the door and move in. No breaking or entering is involved. These squatters will knowingly produce phony leases or other documents that cloud the issue and can send the matter to the court system for a formal eviction, which can take as long as several months.

Even without legitimate-looking paperwork, attorneys say it can still be hard to evict squatting tenants once they've moved in and claim only a verbal month-to-month agreement.

Police who are called out to a house don't want to arrest someone who has a legitimate right to be there, or was duped into renting a place from a bogus landlord. Most police and sheriff's officers don't want to face a lawsuit for acting too quickly nor feel qualified to judge the merits of either side's arguments. They simply tell real-estate agents, asset managers, or the sellers or buyers of the property to get an attorney and start the eviction process.

Which is exactly what we did. My clients contacted an online eviction service, Full Count Services, which charged $1374.00 for their services which included the filing, court costs and having the sheriff lockout the squatters. The eviction has added roughly 60 days to an already long process and cost my clients quite a bit of money.

So buyers, sellers, and real estate agents beware of squatters. Here are a few suggestions to prevent squatters from targeting your home:

•    Have a regular presence at the home. If your home is vacant try to visit it every couple of days or have your real estate agent drop by to make sure everything is OK.
•    Communicate with neighbors. If the house is supposed to be vacant ask them to call you if they notice something suspicious.
•    Keep the house maintained. If the grass is overgrown, or the place looks abandoned in any other way, squatters will correctly assume that no one is there on a regular basis and won’t notice their presence.
•    Change the locks after every move out. This is critical if the house was ever a rental property.

If you have any questions or want to share your experiences with squatters please contact me through my website www.americasells.com


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