How to Deal With Vacant Property Liens, Judgments and Estates

Once you’ve made contact with the owner of a vacant property you will sometimes run into situations that do not arise with traditional property transactions. There are a variety of various issues and your title company will be able to help you with many of them but we’ll mention them to make this information more complete.

One of the first things that you should know is that most liens and other debts owed against the property are paid by the owner at closing. However, you can also be creative when it comes to this type of property purchase. I’ll get into this in a bit, but first I want to talk about the types of debts that might be against the property or the owner.

Tax liens are very common when it comes to vacant properties. Especially if the property has been sitting for any length of time. Depending on your county, the sheriffs office may be very aggressive with dealing with this issue and auctioning the properties at sheriff sale. However, many major metro areas have thousands of vacant properties with taxes that have been owed on them for several years. Other liens might be nuisance liens, clean and seal liens, gas liens, water liens and more.

Judgments against an owner are another popular item that arise on a title report. Judgments can be placed against an owner for any number of reasons. It is important to note the difference between a lien and a judgment. It’s easily remembered like this….A lien is a debt against a property and a judgment is a debt against a person. Judgments can be placed for back child support, law suits, parking tickets, unpaid income taxes and many more reasons.

Dual ownership or tenants in common and tenants by entireties deeds. What this means is that more than one person is on the title to the property and both of the people on the original deed have to sign off on the deed to sell the property. You may also hear that term “Quit claim deed” used from time to time and in that instance you should understand that someone cannot just sign a quit claim deed and give you the same right of ownership as a fee simple deed. In the case of a divorce or a partnership when two people own the property and both have the rights to the property you must get both of them to sign the deed for the sale. If you have a deed where there were percentage rights to the property then your title company may allow a quit claim deed to be used when someone just simply wants to forfeit their equitable rights to the property. Your title company will know how to handle this situation when it comes up but you should be prepared to find the other person on the deed as well.

Deceased owners and estates. In the case of a deceased owner or an estate you will have to find the heir with the legal rights to sell the property. It is a very sensitive issue when it comes to who has the rights to a property so you may want to consult a probate attorney on this one. However, the main thing to know is this……If a person died and they did not have a will stating to whom the property will be left, then someone must be appointed to handle the estate (Even if it’s just 1 single distressed property). They will go to the register of wills and file for what are called “Letters of administration” and pay inheritance tax of the value of the property. It’s important to know that if someone still has receipts from the funeral, they can deduct those as expenses against the inheritance and they will only be taxed on what they actually profit. If the person did die with a will, you can view the will and find out who has the “Letters Testamentary” and that will give them the rights to sell the property to you.

Old mortgages. Sometimes you will get a title report back that has a mortgage on it from many years ago. These may have been from private loans or from a bank that went out of business. If you do have a title with an old mortgage it will have to be discharged before it can be cleared from the title. This can take some time and some work and will be something that the title company can help with. However, if you want to get things done quickly, our recommendation is to lend a helping hand and gather whatever information you can gather to help the title company. You’ll get to closing quicker and that’s the main goal.

These are some of the more common issues that come up on the title search of a vacant property. We’ve settled on hundreds of vacant properties and seen just about every issue that can come up. If we can help you locate the ex spouse, a relative of a deceased owner or the issuing bank that held the original mortgage needs to be tracked to find out who owns the loan now, we can help you out. We’ll find the information you’re looking for guaranteed. To find out more about what we do, visit us at www.WeFindOwners.com

Best of luck with your purchasing of vacant properties.

Thomas Anderson is a successful vacant property investor who specializes in working with investors who need to find the owners of vacant properties but cannot locate the owners. If you have specific questions about what Thomas can do for you please contact him at info@wefindowners.com