Property owner stunned after $500,000 house built on wrong lot: ‘Are you kidding me?’
Anger, accusations, and legal action are firing up after a construction company built a half-million-dollar house on the wrong lot.
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The Title Company has to be sweating bullets right now. It's their whole job to prevent problems like this.
This crap happens (not that at it should and you're correct). I know someone in construction. They leaned a property that the title company just... didn't see the lien? Property was sold, The lien wasn't bonded off or anything either.
It got resolved but man, that would have been a mess. I think at that point the new homeowner is on the hook, and would need to get their due by going after the title company?
Yep, I have a good friend that ran into this issue on his home he bought 20 years ago. After 5 years of living in the home and making payments on it, it was finally discovered that there was no clear title to the property going back 60 years..............
It took another 2 years to clean it all up, but it required the township, county, and a state agency to get involved to make a couple of problems "just go away".
Thats insane. And at that point they were there for 7 years. Most people stay in there house longer, but any million things could have made them want to move in that window. Sick family member, job, whatever, and they would have been stuck.
It wasn't as bad as it sounds. No one was really contesting his ownership - least of all the bank. But a governmental paperwork error had been made a long time ago and no one caught the error until after he bought the property. But it took a long time to fix it due to different levels of government that needed to fix the original error.
My friend still lives there today and I doubt he will ever move out.
Title insurance.
If you are buying property, you can get insurance against this exact issue. If the title is found to be incorrect or a lien is on the property then the insurance company has to deal with it.
That makes sense, I'd hope title insurance folks are easy to work with because that has to be one of those fields where like 99% of people never have a claim against it... at least a hope so lol.
It's hilarious u think these shady developers hired a title company 🤣🤣🤣
If that house had a mortgage then the lending bank almost certainly required the use of one. If it had a construction loan it too probably required a title search and certification.
I could be wrong, but I thought you couldn't get a mortgage for a house that isn't already in a livable condition. That would have come after the thing was completed.
It may not be the same in the US, but in the UK, you can mortgage a new build project.
The company releases money in stages as the build progresses, normally.
In the US this could be done with a short term variable loan called a construction loan that releases money in stages as the build progresses. Once finished if it's not being paid off it would be refinanced into a more traditional mortgage. Mortgages are often pretty different in the US vs UK, most US mortgages are for fixed rates for 30 year terms whereas most UK mortgages are fixed for a much shorter period and then go to variable rates. So you'd be hard pressed to get a bank to agree to a fixed rate 30 year mortgage for a house that doesn't exist yet.
An attorney for PJ’s Construction said the developers didn’t want to hire surveyors.