The Snooze Is Over For Tarrant County Officials As Adverse Possession Home-Snatching Scams Clearly Appear On Their Radar
In Tarrant County, Texas, the Star Telegram reports:
- While county officials were asleep at the wheel, Tarrant County became a magnet this year for an odd assortment of squatters claiming other people's houses all over the area.
- The cast of characters includes a homeowner who scooped up a dead neighbor's house; a woman who came to Fort Worth from Memphis to lay claim to a $2.7 million mansion; people who cited Bible verses as legal justification for taking properties; and career criminals who grabbed homes to lease to tenants.
- All told, county records show that squatters and their associates claimed more than $8 million worth of properties, from Grand Prairie, Mansfield and Arlington to Fort Worth, Haslet and Keller, according to a Star-Telegram examination of county documents. Some of the squatters' elaborate schemes have stumped law enforcement officials.
- One Tarrant constable has even asked the Texas attorney general's office for help in straightening out the mess. "Everybody is just trying to learn what in the world is going on," said Mansfield Constable Clint C. Burgess. "It's the craziest thing how anyone could be so brazen to just break into a home and start living in it."
- The schemes are hard to unravel because of a loophole in a state law that allows people to suddenly claim supposedly abandoned sections of property if no owner is on the spot to challenge such a claim. The law's intent was to help ranchers and others who had tended vacant land for years, so they could eventually gain legal ownership of the property. That's done by filing a document called an adverse possession affidavit with the county clerk.
- But the law doesn't distinguish between a claim on a $27 section of sod and one on a $2.7 million mansion with an elevator, three master bedrooms, a five-car garage and a pond with fish in the back yard.
- File the proper paperwork, pay a $16 filing fee, keep up with the property taxes and live in the house three years or more, and even the courts may not be able to evict you.
For more, see Squatters claim more than $8 million worth of Tarrant County properties.
(1) For some examples of the off-the-wall paperwork being generated in connection with these home-snatching rackets, see:
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