January 12, 2005

Home Non-Ownership

Archi-Sapper and I received a letter yesterday with some surprising news. We don't own our house.

No, I'm not kidding.

You know the house we bought four months ago? The one I blogged about? The one we shopped for, found, bid on, closed on and moved into? The one that had the gas leak that almost killed us and the ceiling that caved in during the storm? Yes, that house. We don't own it. Or all of it, anyway.

Apparently we have a title problem (so does Prince, but that's really a title problem of a different sort). As I have learned over the past 24 hours, we purchased our house from a company we'll call ABC. ABC is in the business of buying houses, renovating them, and selling them for a profit. ABC bought this house about two years ago from a group of people, all of whom are brothers and sisters.

The group of siblings had inherited the house from their parents when their parents passed away. Each sibling inherited an equal interest in the property. Unfortunately for the sibling (and now for us), one of them declared bankruptcy and in order to get one of her creditors off her back, she assigned her interest in the house to her creditor.

This worked like a charm. The only problem was that when the assignment was recorded in the local conveyance office, it was recorded improperly. Thus, when ABC's closing attorney and later our closing attorney did title searches on the property, they came up clean. ABC purchased the house from the group of siblings, never realizing that they hadn't bought the entire house. The bankrupt sibling couldn't sell her interest in the house to ABC or anyone else because she no longer owned that interest. Sadly, she never bothered to apprise anyone of that small fact.

Ultimately it appears that we now own most of our house, with this creditor owning a portion of it that they no longer want. I believe they would like to have someone buy out their interest (wouldn't we all?), but that someone will not be me (nor will it be Archi-Sapper. Or our dog. She's stingy with her money).

Happily, I spoke with the title company today and they've assured me that our home is not in danger and that they will take care of things. Even if they can't, I'm not going to lose (too much) sleep over this, as we wisely purchased title insurance, which is designed exactly for this situation.

After four brief months of home ownership, we've had so many weird things happen to us that we've decided the only weird property related thing that could happen that hasn't (yet) is for someone to call us up and tell us they have mineral rights in our backyard and they'd like for us to stop walking our dog there so they can move a drilling rig onto it and drill for oil.

I'm still waiting for that phone call.

Posted by Kitty at January 12, 2005 06:01 PM

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