Man returns to his family's Connecticut lot to discover $1.4M home being built
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The ability of the land registry insurance funds (assuming they have one) to "refund" lost money is limited and the get out clauses are huge. Basically you can be bankrupted taking "the authority" to law to recover, if they don't cough up. They cough up to preserve integrity in the system. But between the registry/titles-office, the lawyers, the crook who vamoosed the money, the original land owner, the buyers. and the builders its a black hole of blame fingers.
In analogous cases in Australia (torrens title lands registry) there is often somebody left holding the baby (unable to recover their money from the crook, even when the crook is found)
I'm waiting for somebody to throw "solved by blockchain" into this thread. (hint: it isn't, because the crime happens in the real world, not inside hypothesised registries. the real world has processes which break down)
My experience is that title companies a) would not allow this to happen, by accomplishing a legitimate title search and b) they pay out when this happens.
In queensland the lands title function was divorced by statute from government and put into an arms-length private company, wholly owned by the various government departments which need the function.
I know that it's sometimes confusing to call compensation from government for stuffups "insurance" but my understanding is that there is some industry levy which is used to top up a pot of money to pay out, when mistakes are made and can be sheeted home to the registry function.
Separately people have to try and manage their own risk, sure. But there is a scheme (as I understand it) which is meant to deal with the corner cases where the registry function blows up.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-25/mortgage-fraud-gold-c...
is the high profile case which has been discussed here. The state government, which is normally expected to be a model litigant, decided to appeal the judgement they had some burden to meet. The basis of the judgement is that some officer of the registry should not have accepted the lifting of the caveat, the sale/transfer and the reapplication of the caveat. At least one of these things shouldn't have been processed.
If you are interested in learning more you could research the American Land Title Association.
"The Torrens Assurance Fund (Fund) is a statutory compensation scheme designed to compensate people who, through no fault of their own, suffer loss or damage as a result of the operation of the Real Property Act 1900 (RPA)."
Torens Title is a beautiful system. I can't believe how chaotic land title is is other parts of the world. While NSW does still have some old system land, or chain of deeds style land, it represents less than 1% of the land in the state, and that numbers shrinking every year as its titled out.
> "We, as buyer, had no contact with the party impersonating Kenigsberg," Leto said in a statement. "We had no reason to believe he was an impostor. We would not have paid $350,000 for the property — nor would we have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars more in construction — if we had."
Derp. The company owner is either clueless or is playing stupid. Despite what they thought, they don't have title to the real estate. The company is being named in a suit because there is a purported deed saying that they do, and that possible interest needs to be extinguished.
They could get the suit dropped tomorrow if they relinquished any possible interest back to the true owner and agreed to pay the costs of removing their house. Then they can go get their $350k back from the fraudster if they're lucky, or perhaps the title insurance company.
I have built many houses in my life. There is obscene money involved in the overpricing of homes. Even with contemporary costs, you can build for $150 a square foot. That house cost max 350k to build, unless the builders are morons.
The housing industry has become like the wedding industry. We need to remember that the people on the other side of the table are human beings. We can prosper without taking an extra year of a family’s salary just because we can. Greed is a poverty and we are all poorer for it.
4000 sqft * $150/sqft is 600K, not 350K.
Still overpriced by quite a bit even with the cost of the land ($350K) and high end finishes though.
I'm sure you don't mean your absolute statement, otherwise I need your address to build my coal powerplant next to.
Some areas are having real struggles with finding construction workers though. We can thank the devaluation of trades training in schools and the ridiculous notion that college is for everyone for that mess.
Being a skilled tradesperson is a great career option for a lot of people, often the same people that end up stuck in retail or some other hellish profession after going to college and maybe even graduating. Their lives would be probably much better in trades, they would earn 4x as much, probably be in better shape, and have a much higher level of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, someone somewhere along the road convinced them that blue collar work was below them.
It’s one of the principles I used when I was raising children: a trade is something you can do anywhere that everyone needs. You own your own tools, you can show up anywhere and provide an essential service irrespective of the economic conditions autonomously and on your own terms.
Professions tend to be much more dependent on complex societal structures and institutions, tend to be more geographically restricted, and tend to be more restrictive to personal choices.
Some vocations can straddle both categories.
With my children, I made sure each of them had the fundamentals of at least one trade that they found interesting by the time they were 16. It has served them well even though they have all ended up pursuing more entrepreneurial and technology or media related fields.
How are we to believe they were scammed and didn't just pay a forger's fee to make it look like a legitimate purchase?
I think the correct way to approach this is for the original owner to seek maximum damages from 51 Sky Top for developing stolen property and leave it to them to pursue their own remedy from the 'fraudster'.
I just don't see how the buyer didn't do any due diligence on this. Didn't check with the county hall of records?
If you buy a stolen car and drive around with it and are caught it's on you to surrender it to original owner and cover any damage you caused to it. You are the suspected thief until you prove otherwise.
Offer it as a "warning system only", to keep it cheaper than title insurance services. Target land owners, not buyers & sellers. Maybe sell B2B API access to title insurance companies.
There isn't a m² in my country that hasn't been bagged and tagged.
Your ownership claim descends from the chain of previous owners. It's possible that there are encumbrances that aren't currently known. A common example is "paper streets" where a neighborhood was planned out but never built. Then all your neighbors might have an argument that they were looking forward to that right of way that was supposed to run through what is now your plot. It's a huge uphill legal battle on their part, but the point is it's possible they could make it. As more old records are digitized, things like this pop up.
It's not a great system, but like most things in the US, that's just the way it is (in most areas).
It’s pretty clear too that the buyer did nothing wrong so it’s unlikely that they’ll be forced to restore the lot.
This is a case where good attorneys would advise their clients to settle. The untouched lot is never coming back. The $350k lost to a scammer is never coming back because US law enforcement is worthless. There’s $1.4M tied up in this. You want nothing or you want something? If you go to court everyone loses. If you settle everyone gets something, but not everything they want.
And if you really want justice done put a hundred grand into tracking down the scammer and unwinding his life’s work. It’d be far better to take everything from him and send him to prison than for the two victims of the crime to squabble over it.