For most people there home will be their biggest asset, liability and purchase all in one.
It’s an understatement to say that housing is incredibly important to everybody, and
for even more reasons that being a basic human need.
The financial success of families, communities and countries are intertwined with real estate,
which is why it seems silly that people can just take these homes and legally claim them
as their own.
Squatters rights on the surface sound ridiculous.
Reports exist of families going on holidays for as little as three weeks before coming
back to their home with changed locks and a new family living in it.
People in these situations can’t rely on law enforcement because they too are powerless
to remove these people from a home that they claim is their own.
A Soldier from Florida had to go through months of civil court to rid his home of squatters
who had moved onto the property while the soldier was deployed in Afghanistan.
Even after successfully appealing the squatters claim to the property, the serviceman was
left with thousands of dollars in damages that he had no way of recuperating off the
evicted squatters.
This horrible situation is also unique to housing, after all you can’t steal a car,
hide it in your garage for a year and then claim it’s yours.
So if that kind of legal protection extends to automobiles, why not our most important
assets?
Well it’s mostly because without the rules that make nightmare scenarios like this possible,
our housing system simply wouldn’t work at all.
To find out how it’s time to learn how money works which was made possible today by The
Daily Upside.
The Daily Upside is a totally free high quality email newsletter with a strong focus on business
and finance.
Their short articles are written daily by industry insiders and financial analysts who
are able to make sense of world events in a way that is both informative and simple
to understand, even simple enough for me while I am working through my first coffee of the
morning.
Do you want to know the real reason why Elon Musk is now the biggest shareholder in Twiiter,
or why Walmart Truck Drivers are earning the same as Goldman Sachs Analysts?
Well you would if you were subscribed to the daily upside.
Sign up using the link below to make sure you keep up to date with everything in the
world of business and finance with the daily upside.
…
Squatters rights (like a lot of things wrong with America) originated in England.
This place is seriously old and it’s filled with land claims that date back hundreds of
years.
Squatters rights were originally established because it was almost impossible to keep track
of who owned what at a time when all records were kept on paper stashed in damp towers
and watched over by a barely literate population.
The laws were set up to avoid two things, wasted space, and wars.
Land owners in the middle ages were nobility and they owned thousands of acres.
Most of this land was used for farming or hunting.
Unused land was wasted land that would be better off in the hands of another lord who
could use it to feed the kingdom.
Use of land being the decider of ownership forced the lords to use it or lose it so to
speak.
It also avoided a situation where two lords would try to claim ownership over the same
piece of unused land.
Internal wars were bad for kingdoms so higher lords would usually settle these squabbles
by awarding the land to whoever they determined to be to person using it.
As the world got less feudal it made sense to keep these laws in place because all of
a sudden regular peasants were starting to own land of their own, oh and these people
could vote on why made their laws now, so the lawmakers wanted to keep them happy.
Land use rights prevented the great great great great grandchild of a lord, finding
a land deed in a dungeon somewhere and using it to claim ownership over a new housing development.
I think most of you can agree that kind of situation is worth avoiding, but where is
the line drawn?
What timeframe is too long, or too short?
Records have only been migrated onto computer databases in the last three decades at most.
If you live in a country that’s been around for more than a hundred years, it’s almost
a certainty that there is a document out there that says your land belongs to someone else.
The difficulty in keeping records indefinitely is why most legal systems have a statue of
limitations.
In plain English a time limit on events you can challenge legally.
Records get lost, stolen, destroyed, forged and even hacked.
The last thing a law abiding home owner would want is for someone to come along and claim
that their home actually didn’t actually belong to them.
Land use laws are designed to protect people from these situations.
This is also why squatters rights style laws don’t apply to cars or other goods.
Land is unique in the sense that it is the only commodity not created with human labour,
and that can last indefinitely.
A block of land was created 4.5 billion years ago, a car is at most 100 years old so they
are not liable to have the same problems with multiple ownership claims.
One exception to this is that there are variations of squatters rights rules do exists for things
like ancient artifacts.
Any given ancient Greek statue will have a different legal owner today than the first
person who laid claim to it hundreds of years ago.
…
Ok so maybe these laws make sense in a places like England, but what about America?
It’s been ruled by one single system of government since it’s independence so why
do we need these laws?
Well for much the same reasons.
Early American settlers basically just claimed land out west and records were even worse
than what existed in Europe at the time.
So sorry my fellow Americans, we aren’t any better that the Europeans.
Not to mention the fact that none of us really want to be beating our chest too loudly about
eternal land ownership rights now do we?
…
At this point I should probably explain what squatters’ rights are, because, what we
are hearing about when we read stories like this, are not in fact squatters rights, they
are instead, civil disputes over oral contracts.
In America oral contract are just as binding as written and signed contracts, they are
just much harder to dispute because it just becomes a case of he said she said.
If a family moves into an empty home law enforcement is in most instances powerless to remove them,
but this has nothing to do with squatters rights.
People just assume squatters rights are at play here because the people taking the home
are called squatters.
The reason that police cannot bust them out of the home is because the squatting occupants
can claim that they home is theirs, or that they are renting it, or that they have a private
agreement in place with the owners to live there.
Police officers are not judges and they cannot and should not have the authority to make
discretionary decisions about peoples housing arrangements, that’s the job of the courts.
Needing to take squatters to court to prove that no oral contract was established is unbelievably
frustrating, but it’s better than the alternative.
If you have a private agreement with room mates to pay a share of rent every month you
don’t want to get thrown out on your ass by the police because your room mates are
sick of you cooking fish in the communal microwave (although honestly that should be consider
a war crime).
It’s also not right that landlords could get police to kick families out of a rented
home if they weren’t able to provide suitable evidence of rights to residency right there
and then on the spot.
Think to yourself, if a police team busted into your home today and tried to kick you
out, how would you definitively prove that you owned the place and weren’t just living
in there as a squatter?
It’s not that easy, and that’s why we have courts, and while you are going through
that court process you would probably appreciate being able to stay in your home while you
prove that you definitively do or do not have a right to live there.
Actual squatters rights cases are EXTREMELY rare, all of these stories are just legal
challenges that needed their day in court.
OKAY, But what if you wanted to get a free house by exploiting these laws?
How would one go about doing that?
As a renter in the bay area I will admit that the thought has crossed my mind.
Well in America it is almost impossible to get squatters rights, with almost being the
imperative word here.
To claim squatters rights you need to move onto a property that you reasonably believed
to be your own.
This is basically impossible in suburbs or cities because land holdings in these areas
are well defined by fences and buildings.
A patch of land directly adjacent to a poorly demarcated field is probably your best bet.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where your field ends and your neighbours begins, mistakes
happen.
The second important step is that you need to prove that you didn’t have permission
from the actual land owners to dwell on the property.
This might sound counterintuitive, but if a landowner says it’s cool that you stay
in their house, then they have acknowledged your lodging and you have acknowledged their
ownership.
Think of it this way.
If your friend came over to your house and they told you they would let you to sleep
in your bed, you would immediately challenge that statement by saying “you’re god damn
right I’m allowed to sleep in my bed, it’s my damn bed!”.
If someone with no rightful claim to a landholding gave permission to the rightful land owner
to use the land, the legal assumption is that the true land owner would challenge the assumption
that the land is not theirs in court.
So if you want a free house, you can’t have permission to live in it and you have got
to be able to prove it was reasonable for you to think you owned it.
You then need to maintain this status quo for the duration of the statue of limitations
period in your civil jurisdiction for California that is ten years, for other places it’s
as little as 1 year or as much as 100 years.
Your milage will vary.
Once you have done that the property is yours for all intents and purposes, if the previous
owner challenges your claim, they won’t be able to provide proof of ownership that
falls within the statue of limitations timeframe.
The same rules that stop a seventeenth-generation lord claiming medieval land holdings are the
same rules that will stop a family unlucky enough to leave an unmarked piece of land
unattended for just slightly too long.
On a positive note as digital records and satellite mapping become standard practice
these kinds of disputes are going to become far less common than they already are.
So, sorry if you thought this was your only chance at owning a home you are probably going
to need a better plan.
Maybe a side hustle to accelerate your savings plan?
But then again, maybe not.
Go and watch my video outlining all of the lies you have been told about side hustles
and multiple streams of income to find out why.
Thanks again to the daily upside for making it possible for everybody to keep on learning
How Money Works.