A home buyer has purchased property that is only reached by an inaccessible county road. The seller gave them temporary access through his property until the road is repaired. Now the neighbor is selling his property and will not give them an easement. The easement is not recorded but listed in the contract as access until the road becomes available.
A home seller is being sued by their buyer for missing fixtures in a bathroom. The buyer claims they had a verbal contract but the written contract contains nothing regarding the fixtures. A written contract usually is considered binding over a verbal contract but litigation is difficult, time-consuming, expensive and can be heartbreaking. If at all possible, you should try to resolve the conflict outside of court.
Should I declare bankruptcy? I've got a ton of credit card debt and I'm worried that my creditors will put a lien against my house. I don't want to lose my house. What should I do?
Here's the scenario. Your mother inherits some land when your father dies. She then becomes "friendly" with a neighbor who is about 25 years younger. She sells her new friend half the land without telling anybody. Now, years later, you and your mother are looking into selling the property, but the friendly neighbor moved away years ago and nobody knows where he is.
To maintain a primary residence in a particular state, you generally need to live in that state more than six months of the year and the home you own there must be your primary residence. When a person has a primary residence, they generally work and live in the same general area, register to vote in that community, obtain a driver's license in that state and maintain contacts with that community. It's unlikely that a husband and wife could claim separate primary residence.
Tenants leave a landlord with cigarette burns on the carpet and kitchen floor. Damages exceed the security deposit. What can the landlord do to recover the damages? The lease may provide that in case the tenant damaged the apartment, you have the right to restore it to the condition in which it was supposed to be returned. If you are allowed under the lease to replace the carpet and the flooring, you should be able to recover these costs when you sue your former tenants.
When you own rental or investment property you may be concerned about liability. You may want to transfer your property into a limited liability corporation (LLC), but that could cause your mortgage lender to call your loan in for full payments. There are other ways to protect yourself from lawsuits when you own rental property and aren't ready to pay off the mortgage.
Using a 1031 exchange on jointly-owned property depends on if the homeowners own the home as joint tenants or tenants in common. The cost of setting up a 1031 exchange trust isn't much but the benefits of deferring a significant amount of tax to the Federal government can be tremendous. The rules regulating 1031 exchanges are rather strict.
What can you do if you own a condo and your upstairs neighbor suddenly gets more noisy than usual? You cannot prevent a home owner from making use of a condominium in a usual and customary manner. The first thing you should do is to try to find out what changed in the unit upstairs to make the noise worse. You may have options for fixing the carpet or insulation between the units.
