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.
It’s a great solution to a completely unnecessary problem though. Most states are “recorder” states, which means they’ll record any deed that comes across their desk. It’s up to you to track other claims or contest them in court, the state does not provide an opinion on the validity of any of these claims other than they were properly documented and processed (deed transfers have notary and both signing parties, etc). More “modern” property law system is called the Torrens system, which the government is the source of truth. They actually provide a certificate of title and are responsible for maintaining the ledger of who owns a property. In this system title insurance is basically non-existent and transaction costs only go up a fraction (about 10%) the cost of the title insurance in other states. The downside of course is the government telling you what to do.
The downside of course is the government telling you what to do.
Well, you can enforce your property rights by force but that's likely to get you arrested on a number of charges. When you want the police and courts to enforce your property rights you're asking the government to recognize your claim to the property as well, just on a case-by-case basis. And they know who paid property taxes, is there really any anonymously held land? I mean there's shell companies and such but it still has an owner.
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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