A surprising law foundation in the US is that if you live somewhere long enough as if you were the owner, then it becomes yours. Sometimes known as "squatters rights". This feels a bit unfair at first.
However, this "if you think you own it, you probably do own it" has turned out fairly well. At least in most places in the US, unlike England, you don't have to trace all property transfers back to Norman Conquest in 1066 in order to know who owns land. Anyone who holds it long enough resets the baseline date at which you need to trace it back to.
As a practical matter I think this mostly confuses adverse tenancy with adverse possession. The latter case, of squatters gaining full legal title to a piece of property, is extraordinarily rare, and as I understand it the cases all tend to be marginal (like: abutments of adjacent rural properties changing hands). Adverse tenancy is somewhat more common: you can establish through your actions an expectation that you're a legitimate tenant, and it can be legally obnoxious to remove a tenant.
The cases Patrick describes in this piece aren't really about adverse possession, but rather about property sales where the seller (or the seller's seller, etc) doesn't have the full legal authority to sell in the first place, and the people who do show up later to contest the sale.
Yes, I think what most people think of when they think of "squatters" in the US is a much different dispute over tenancy, not title. Most (all?) places in the US it is possible to be a legitimate tenant without any lease agreement, although I've found many people aren't aware of this. The term "squatter" is used for a broad spectrum of issues of tenancy, many of which aren't at all clear-cut. The current popular take on the issue might be that it's some kind of loophole or problem with the law which should be summarily handled, but the root of the issue is simply that cops aren't courts that can't perform complicated eviction proceedings, even if one party claims that the issue is simple (because it might not be).
Adverse position cleans up title, because the conditions are basically live in it and fufill the obligations of an owner for X years, and you are the owner.
So if many years later, someone comes out of the woodwork to claim a fradulent conveyance, it doesn't matter. You lived in it and paid taxes as if it was yours for 10 years (or whatever), so either it's yours by conveyance or yours by adverse possession, and it's too late to undo the transfer.
I think that the case that Patrick describes leads straight into the intended case for adverse possession. You need to extend the timeline a litte.
Okay, so Bob owns a house. Bob marries Jane in an ill-advised, quickly ignored ceremony, but never gets formally divorced. Bob sells his house (in a community property state) to Ted. Ted lives in the house for 20 years. Jane dies. Jane's son Rick goes through her stuff, realizes that she was still married to Bob, realizes that Jane had a legitimate claim on the house that Ted has been living in for 20 years.
This is a classic adverse possession situation. Ted has been openly and notoriously living in this house, acting as owner. If Rick presses his claim, it is likely that Ted can win an adverse possession claim (assuming that Ted lives in a place where adverse possession still works the way it basically did in common law).
I did gopher work for Title Insurance company one summer. This type of stuff is so common in certain areas. Another common one we saw similar to "X party has claim no one realized" was "Property was passed down generation from generation and now someone wants to sell it and lack of clear title emerges because property is still in long dead grandparents name."
> The latter case, of squatters gaining full legal title to a piece of property, is extraordinarily rare, and as I understand it the cases all tend to be marginal (like: abutments of adjacent rural properties changing hands).
The marginal cases are more common certainly, but the full version does happen. There's one that comes up on Reddit every so often of someone living in a home that had been abandoned in the 2008 crisis and presumably just written off by the legal owners (sounded like it had been owned via multiple levels of bankrupt property companies) for long enough that they claimed ownership, apparently successfully.
The one I see on Reddit is "Texas guy buys $300,000 house for $16" (the registration fee), but he was evicted less than a year later. I'd love to see the case where someone succeeded in holding the house! I did go looking, but it's just yard fence after yard fence in the court cases.
No, England has a new system, as of 2002. Property ownership records have been centralized, under "HM Land Registry", which has more authority than it used to have.
Those records are now treated as definitive. If a fraudster can get a record changed in HM Land Registry, they own the property. The fraudster can only be sued for damages.[1] The fraudster has probably sold the property to an innocent party. That innocent party now has good title to the property, and the original owner is out.
People have gone on vacation and had their houses stolen.
Adverse possession becomes a lot more of an obvious outcome when one stops thinking about urban areas and well put together homes, and instead starts thinking about abandoned areas and properties with unknown owners. At the end of the day, towns want to collect property taxes and would rather have someone improving a property and paying taxes on it than a slowly degrading property that has clearly been forgotten about, considering the owner didn't notice the adverse tenant for decades. Or maybe nobody could manage to contact the owner for decades. Or maybe the named owner for a plot of land was lost to time. What is the other option, leave it untouched for decades and centuries because at some point in the past someone had their name on it?
This seems like a problem that's automatically solved by land tax. If the property is abandoned, the tax goes unpaid and the state auctions the property off to cover the unpaid tax. Voila, new owner of record.
That works to the extent that a polity is willing and able to seize, care for, and sell off parcels. At scale, this is not guaranteed to be as easy as it sounds. Case in point: Detroit.
When I applied for a development permit for my PV arrays, I had to do something very similar to the core of a title search. I headed on down to the county records department, and had to track down each sale (in reverse order), which are recorded in big paper books with handwritten entries, sorted by the first letter of the seller's family name then by date.
However, since this is New Mexico, and even the idea of formal record keeping here is, cough, rather recent, I only had to go back to 1980 for the purposes of the permit
Yes, but keep in mind that "as if you were the owner" in at least some jurisdictions means that you were maintaining and improving the property and paying the property taxes. And we're talking about many years, not just squatting on a vacant property for a few months.
However, this "if you think you own it, you probably do own it" has turned out fairly well. At least in most places in the US, unlike England, you don't have to trace all property transfers back to Norman Conquest in 1066 in order to know who owns land. Anyone who holds it long enough resets the baseline date at which you need to trace it back to.