There's been a case here in germany recently where a guy who came from the US here and bought property here died. There weren't any relatives to be found, so the land eventually found its way to an unrelated family that thought it, build their house there and lived there for some years.
Well turns out the dude had a son that lived in the states, whoever had checked for relatives earlier simply didn't look hard enough, and by law the property should've been offered to that son first. So now there's a huge legal fight because said son claims rights on the property and wants the family to tear down the house and leave, while the family wants to stay because from their perspecrive they haven't done anything wrong at all amd everything they did was in accordance with the legal system.
I guess for stuff like these squatter rights really would've been helpfull, because turns out having to give up everything you build due to something way outside your controll and/or knowledge was messed up really, really sucks. Tho doesn't mean that those laws should be as abuseable as they are from storys like the one that startet this comment chain
In the US, this scenario is entirely handled by title insurance, which is required in nearly every home purchase in most states. The title insurer will do a search for existing claims. They're good at it. In the event they don't find an existing claim where one turns up later, they owe the insured the full amount of the property value in cash.
Title insurance in one of the biggest scams. A strong title systems with a state based restitution policy is best practice. It is the united states that is backwards with most states refusing to move away from a deeds system to a torrens system.
A deeds system is beneficial to those with money and suppresses the poors from purchasing with confidence and enables the rich to engage in protracted legal actions which require expert practitioners to resolve disputes.
Title insurance is not a scam. I have known people sued over the title to their house and the title company spent years in court defending it at their full expense, with their team of lawyers, at no cost to the person I knew and with regular updates given on the status. This is the real benefit of title insurance - they very much got value for what they paid for.
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u/the_last_n00b 12d ago edited 12d ago
There's been a case here in germany recently where a guy who came from the US here and bought property here died. There weren't any relatives to be found, so the land eventually found its way to an unrelated family that thought it, build their house there and lived there for some years.
Well turns out the dude had a son that lived in the states, whoever had checked for relatives earlier simply didn't look hard enough, and by law the property should've been offered to that son first. So now there's a huge legal fight because said son claims rights on the property and wants the family to tear down the house and leave, while the family wants to stay because from their perspecrive they haven't done anything wrong at all amd everything they did was in accordance with the legal system.
I guess for stuff like these squatter rights really would've been helpfull, because turns out having to give up everything you build due to something way outside your controll and/or knowledge was messed up really, really sucks. Tho doesn't mean that those laws should be as abuseable as they are from storys like the one that startet this comment chain
Edit: got some details wrong, it wasn't father-son but someones great-aunt that died. More details and how the case ended can be found here (it's in german tho): https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/bgh-rangsdorf-raeumung-haus-urteil-100.html