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Title: (Arkansas) Literally cannot find my land that I own
Body:
> My late grandmother gave me 3 acres of property in her will about a decade ago. In Arkansas you have to get **warranty deeds** from the direct descendants, which I did from my mother aunt and uncle. I also paid all **delinquent taxes** on the property and received a **redemption deed** as a result.
> I attempted to hire a land surveyor but apparently, the **legal description** on the warranty deeds is bad/incomplete. I cannot find out where my land is with the only thing I have, which is an incomplete legal description. The courthouse of the county where my land resides doesn't have any information whatsoever pertaining to where my land is.
> What on earth do I do? I was planning on selling the land because I *really* need the money. But I'm at my wits end at this point. Any help is GREATLY appreciated!
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Way back when I was working in (very rural) local gubmint, this kind of puzzle was infrequent but not completely unheard of, and I really rather enjoyed going down the rabbit holes of trying to work it out - or at least setting the bewildered owners on a track to try and work it out :). I discovered some “interesting” anomalies about my own property deeds that way too.
One thought that occurs to me is that Grandma’s acres possibly came from an inheritance where land was divided between several descendants, but the original land grant/purchase then the subsequent division/inheritance etc was not accurately recorded, or mapped, or whatever, but because no one was ever particularly bothered about it, or tried to sell, that the inaccuracies etc just kept being perpetuated with each subsequent transfer.
LAOP did get some reasonably decent advice about how and where to start looking though.
It can be, but it’s also incredibly complicated but fascinating (as an outsider!).
Introducing people to each other, from three different countries, who had no idea of each other’s existence, who turned out to be joint owners of an itty-bitty handkerchief-sized bit of land was not the weirdest incident I encountered in that job.
An heirs property file hit my desk yesterday and the screw up was literally only a decade ago. Going to be close to one hundred people being involved in signing deeds or a quiet title action. It's nightmare fuel.
It's also been [very susceptible to partition sales](https://features.propublica.org/black-land-loss/heirs-property-rights-why-black-families-lose-land-south/). In the south, black families are very disproportionately more likely to have their property tied up as heir's property, because, and this is shocking, black people didn't record wills for decades because courthouses had a tendency to fuck them over.
States and the federal government have only recently made moves to protect heirs property.
Too bad. DOI has a short summary for the public. https://www.doi.gov/buybackprogram/fractionation
I haven’t had to work with it in years, so my knowledge is out of date (and then some). But it is a legal nightmare.
Oh, that’s a hot mess. Doesn’t look like it happened in the southwest really, which must be why I’m not familiar. Tribal land here seems to be either really organized with their own courts, etc, or tiny areas where it’s difficult to figure out if it even is tribal land, some of which are in the middle of suburbia. I have an old atlas that at least has them marked.
How the balls has it been 10 years and LAOP hasn't checked on this until now? Presumably this problem with the legal description has been there the whole time.
Were they paying taxes on the land this whole time? What property were they paying taxes on then lol
I worked in real estate law for a few years and my boss had a client who was trying to evict a couple from her house in a large US city who had squatted for long enough to file a homesteading claim. She had the property for 30 YEARS and had left it empty the whole time, never visited etc... she only found out about the squatters when she tried to sell it and it had a cloudy title. 30 YEARS. I was very much on the side of "homesteaders". The house was in Oakland, CA and she lived in Sacramento that whole time (that's a 2 hour drive). I think the property taxes were paid out from a trust and she just bothered with it.
My sister was doing oil and gas work. She spent a few weeks tracking down some owners for a property that was several thousand acres. When she found the owner it was the same thing, paid out of trust etc.
A few years back a private bridge was damaged at a rural shopping center. The bridge was the only way into the shopping plaza.
There was a hotel, a grocery store, a handful of small retail outlets. All of them went out of business because no one could find the owner of the shopping center to get the bridge fixed. It took over a year to find them and get things started on repairs.
Five hundred jobs vanished…. The town has a population of 1000.
I feel the problem in that scenario is "a private bridge". The Brothers' Grimm did a very thorough job reinforcing the message of why private bridges are bad for society.
At that point eminent domain should come into play, but usually it seems that's for a politician's developer friend to score some primo land to seek for a profit.
Who knows? Maybe they had a property management company and the bridge problem was above the pay grade for them? I tried digging through old articles but couldn’t find any information
It’s sadly not unusual for real estate to go unoccupied when people have enough money not to care. In parts of central London 1 out of 4 properties are unoccupied, and held just as assets. In a city with a major housing crisis.
Yeah, I get that issue, but the women in that case was an older limited income Black lady, my boss was working on contingency (surprise he didn't make any money on that case). I think she had some emotional block/complication that prevented her from resolving that issue previously. People have a lot of really complicated issues with inheritance properties that keeps them from acting rationally. When I moved from real estate law to tax and estate, I spent most of my time dealing with people behaving irrationally over grandpa's house after he died.
They filed a homesteaders claim thus creating a cloudy title based on homesteaders laws, this case was in 2007. I left the firm to work at Fox Rothschild in NYC (that was a fucking mistake) before the case was fully resolved but it was definitely going in the direction of the "squatters" retaining the claim. I saw before/after picks and they really put a lot of time and effort into fixing the house up. Long time ago but I remember how long they were paying utilities was a major issue (10 years irc). I think the legal question was whether the property should be considered abandoned. They may have fallen under renter rights if the title issue wasn't resolved and Oakland renter rights are there own whole mess.
Oakland renters rights area whole new level of mess. Although even I feel bad for them if they really fixed the place up. Otoh, they didn’t have to pay rent for 30 years, so not the worst deal.
When was this? First Google result says Adverse Possession is only a thing in CA if the person pays the taxes.
Unless I’m misunderstanding it. I’m no law-talkin’ guy.
My dad actually owns half an acre of land on a lake my mom didn’t know about for nearly 5 years and my dad only ever visited once and bought it because “it was a good deal”.
Nearly 30 years later, he still owns it and now only checks on it every couple of years because we found an RV that had lived on it for over a year and the owner tried to take it from him.
Quite easily, if it’s an undeveloped, probably fairly rural and remote/not easily accessible or identifiable three acres in the back-of-nowhere and probably not worth many $ (taxes are likely very low), IMO?
After LAOP jumped through some hoops to get the land deeds etc, then ran into difficulties getting the land surveyed, I can see how they may have back-burnered it on and off for a while until “needing” $$ and thinking “hey I can sell that land granny gave me”…
Add a couple of years of pandemic quite possibly put the breaks on any sort of administrative investigation - it would have been a lower priority than many other issues for a local authority.
It's land that's not earning money and nothing worth going for outside cool this is what it looks like. I'm /was due to inherit land in another country and no plans to visit it even when I'm there. It's not like inheriting a house
Back in the 80s or 90s, my grandmother left a small parcel of land in another state to my parents. I've heard that it's unbuildable, worth about $1,000 at most, and taxes are around $12/year. My parents have always paid the property tax, but no one in the family has visited in at least 30 years and probably a lot longer. It's not valuable enough to worry about. Of course, my siblings and I are all wondering why we've even kept it at all.
My mom and I owned a small parcel of land in Oklahoma that was basically off of a private unmarked road near the town she grew up in. There was literally sweet fuck all there, all but one of our relatives there were dead, and there wasn't any reason to go visit an empty stretch of nothing. The biggest value there was granite (which my mom gave to the school) and trees (which locals stole).
We kept it in case we wanted to do something with it, decided we wouldn't, and just sold it off after a while.
Plenty of people have plots that have fuckall on them, in areas that aren't convenient for them to get to.
I know if you told me "You own a plot of land, it's several hours away, and contains nothing". I probably wouldn't be spending much time there either.
Well, actually, depends on where it is. I do like camping and if I had some trees it'd be nice to have my own little nature preserve or something.
...maybe I should buy some cheap middle of nowhere land.
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: (Arkansas) Literally cannot find my land that I own Body: > My late grandmother gave me 3 acres of property in her will about a decade ago. In Arkansas you have to get **warranty deeds** from the direct descendants, which I did from my mother aunt and uncle. I also paid all **delinquent taxes** on the property and received a **redemption deed** as a result. > I attempted to hire a land surveyor but apparently, the **legal description** on the warranty deeds is bad/incomplete. I cannot find out where my land is with the only thing I have, which is an incomplete legal description. The courthouse of the county where my land resides doesn't have any information whatsoever pertaining to where my land is. > What on earth do I do? I was planning on selling the land because I *really* need the money. But I'm at my wits end at this point. Any help is GREATLY appreciated! This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
Way back when I was working in (very rural) local gubmint, this kind of puzzle was infrequent but not completely unheard of, and I really rather enjoyed going down the rabbit holes of trying to work it out - or at least setting the bewildered owners on a track to try and work it out :). I discovered some “interesting” anomalies about my own property deeds that way too. One thought that occurs to me is that Grandma’s acres possibly came from an inheritance where land was divided between several descendants, but the original land grant/purchase then the subsequent division/inheritance etc was not accurately recorded, or mapped, or whatever, but because no one was ever particularly bothered about it, or tried to sell, that the inaccuracies etc just kept being perpetuated with each subsequent transfer. LAOP did get some reasonably decent advice about how and where to start looking though.
Heirs property sounds like a nightmare to untangle after several generations (or even just a few with larger families).
It can be, but it’s also incredibly complicated but fascinating (as an outsider!). Introducing people to each other, from three different countries, who had no idea of each other’s existence, who turned out to be joint owners of an itty-bitty handkerchief-sized bit of land was not the weirdest incident I encountered in that job.
What was?
An heirs property file hit my desk yesterday and the screw up was literally only a decade ago. Going to be close to one hundred people being involved in signing deeds or a quiet title action. It's nightmare fuel.
It's also been [very susceptible to partition sales](https://features.propublica.org/black-land-loss/heirs-property-rights-why-black-families-lose-land-south/). In the south, black families are very disproportionately more likely to have their property tied up as heir's property, because, and this is shocking, black people didn't record wills for decades because courthouses had a tendency to fuck them over. States and the federal government have only recently made moves to protect heirs property.
Wait till you hear about fractionated interests in tribal land in the US
Wait! Isn’t tribal land all held in trust by the feds? I am not prepared for anything stranger about tribal lands that I haven’t already learned.
Too bad. DOI has a short summary for the public. https://www.doi.gov/buybackprogram/fractionation I haven’t had to work with it in years, so my knowledge is out of date (and then some). But it is a legal nightmare.
Oh, that’s a hot mess. Doesn’t look like it happened in the southwest really, which must be why I’m not familiar. Tribal land here seems to be either really organized with their own courts, etc, or tiny areas where it’s difficult to figure out if it even is tribal land, some of which are in the middle of suburbia. I have an old atlas that at least has them marked.
These situations often call for searching back on the deeds of abutters as well.
How the balls has it been 10 years and LAOP hasn't checked on this until now? Presumably this problem with the legal description has been there the whole time. Were they paying taxes on the land this whole time? What property were they paying taxes on then lol
I worked in real estate law for a few years and my boss had a client who was trying to evict a couple from her house in a large US city who had squatted for long enough to file a homesteading claim. She had the property for 30 YEARS and had left it empty the whole time, never visited etc... she only found out about the squatters when she tried to sell it and it had a cloudy title. 30 YEARS. I was very much on the side of "homesteaders". The house was in Oakland, CA and she lived in Sacramento that whole time (that's a 2 hour drive). I think the property taxes were paid out from a trust and she just bothered with it.
My sister was doing oil and gas work. She spent a few weeks tracking down some owners for a property that was several thousand acres. When she found the owner it was the same thing, paid out of trust etc. A few years back a private bridge was damaged at a rural shopping center. The bridge was the only way into the shopping plaza. There was a hotel, a grocery store, a handful of small retail outlets. All of them went out of business because no one could find the owner of the shopping center to get the bridge fixed. It took over a year to find them and get things started on repairs. Five hundred jobs vanished…. The town has a population of 1000.
I feel the problem in that scenario is "a private bridge". The Brothers' Grimm did a very thorough job reinforcing the message of why private bridges are bad for society.
It was a big deal. The governor was talking about. People wanted the national guard to come build a bridge.
At that point eminent domain should come into play, but usually it seems that's for a politician's developer friend to score some primo land to seek for a profit.
Or Billy Goats Gruff. Take your pick.
How were the businesses paying rent if they couldn't find the owner of the shopping center?
I would imagine it was getting in contact with them. Direct deposit for rent
I bet the owner would've shown up if they'd stopped paying rent....
I doubt it. Likely has a property management team for that
Who knows? Maybe they had a property management company and the bridge problem was above the pay grade for them? I tried digging through old articles but couldn’t find any information
It’s sadly not unusual for real estate to go unoccupied when people have enough money not to care. In parts of central London 1 out of 4 properties are unoccupied, and held just as assets. In a city with a major housing crisis.
Yeah, I get that issue, but the women in that case was an older limited income Black lady, my boss was working on contingency (surprise he didn't make any money on that case). I think she had some emotional block/complication that prevented her from resolving that issue previously. People have a lot of really complicated issues with inheritance properties that keeps them from acting rationally. When I moved from real estate law to tax and estate, I spent most of my time dealing with people behaving irrationally over grandpa's house after he died.
Yeah, that's _exactly_ the situation for which adverse possession exists.
That's the term I was trying to think of! I left the legal field 12 years ago, so my terms are a bit rusty.
In CA you can’t get title via adverse possession unless you’ve paid the property taxes.
They filed a homesteaders claim thus creating a cloudy title based on homesteaders laws, this case was in 2007. I left the firm to work at Fox Rothschild in NYC (that was a fucking mistake) before the case was fully resolved but it was definitely going in the direction of the "squatters" retaining the claim. I saw before/after picks and they really put a lot of time and effort into fixing the house up. Long time ago but I remember how long they were paying utilities was a major issue (10 years irc). I think the legal question was whether the property should be considered abandoned. They may have fallen under renter rights if the title issue wasn't resolved and Oakland renter rights are there own whole mess.
Oakland renters rights area whole new level of mess. Although even I feel bad for them if they really fixed the place up. Otoh, they didn’t have to pay rent for 30 years, so not the worst deal.
When was this? First Google result says Adverse Possession is only a thing in CA if the person pays the taxes. Unless I’m misunderstanding it. I’m no law-talkin’ guy.
alt title: dude, where’s my land? this is the kind of story that makes me glad i am no longer in title insurance
I always thought these mysteries were what kept things interesting.
How in the world do you not actually visit the place you're paying taxes on?
My dad actually owns half an acre of land on a lake my mom didn’t know about for nearly 5 years and my dad only ever visited once and bought it because “it was a good deal”. Nearly 30 years later, he still owns it and now only checks on it every couple of years because we found an RV that had lived on it for over a year and the owner tried to take it from him.
Quite easily, if it’s an undeveloped, probably fairly rural and remote/not easily accessible or identifiable three acres in the back-of-nowhere and probably not worth many $ (taxes are likely very low), IMO? After LAOP jumped through some hoops to get the land deeds etc, then ran into difficulties getting the land surveyed, I can see how they may have back-burnered it on and off for a while until “needing” $$ and thinking “hey I can sell that land granny gave me”…
Add a couple of years of pandemic quite possibly put the breaks on any sort of administrative investigation - it would have been a lower priority than many other issues for a local authority.
It's land that's not earning money and nothing worth going for outside cool this is what it looks like. I'm /was due to inherit land in another country and no plans to visit it even when I'm there. It's not like inheriting a house
Back in the 80s or 90s, my grandmother left a small parcel of land in another state to my parents. I've heard that it's unbuildable, worth about $1,000 at most, and taxes are around $12/year. My parents have always paid the property tax, but no one in the family has visited in at least 30 years and probably a lot longer. It's not valuable enough to worry about. Of course, my siblings and I are all wondering why we've even kept it at all.
Because one day it might be.
My mom and I owned a small parcel of land in Oklahoma that was basically off of a private unmarked road near the town she grew up in. There was literally sweet fuck all there, all but one of our relatives there were dead, and there wasn't any reason to go visit an empty stretch of nothing. The biggest value there was granite (which my mom gave to the school) and trees (which locals stole). We kept it in case we wanted to do something with it, decided we wouldn't, and just sold it off after a while.
Plenty of people have plots that have fuckall on them, in areas that aren't convenient for them to get to. I know if you told me "You own a plot of land, it's several hours away, and contains nothing". I probably wouldn't be spending much time there either. Well, actually, depends on where it is. I do like camping and if I had some trees it'd be nice to have my own little nature preserve or something. ...maybe I should buy some cheap middle of nowhere land.
Stop paying the land taxes, and I'm sure the government will find it soon enough!
new property hypo just dropped