Your Investment Property Could Be Someone Else’s Before You Know It: How to Protect Yourself Against Squatters

Have you checked in on the properties you own but don’t live in consistently? It’s definitely worth the time to verify your properties remain unoccupied or that tenants have moved out when they were supposed to, even if it sounds strange or silly. A squatter is someone who is living in your home without permission. There are several ways to approach the matter.

Squatter’s rights are created by obtaining a title in real estate without paying or compensating the actual property owner. It is a division of the legal concept known as adverse possession. When an individual person or, in some cases, a business physically takes possession of property in a way that conflicts with the rights of the property’s true owner, adverse possession laws kick in.

A squatter needs to take certain legal requirements in order to establish squatter’s rights. These steps are important to know so they can be combated in the event that you as a property owner have a squatter trying to claim title to your land.

Each state has its own period of time in which a squatter must first maintain actual possession of the property. Anywhere from between seven to fifteen years is generally what most states require. A squatter must have physical presence on the property in order to meet the actual possession requirement, not just a verbal claim. The squatter must also use the property in an open and notorious way. You as a landowner can benefit from this requirement, because if no one is able to see how the squatter is using the property, your claim is strengthened because the squatter’s use is neither open nor notorious. The squatter must also be the only one exclusively using the property as a third requirement. The only way to establish this element is by excluding other people from the property in a way that implies the squatter is the actual property owner. If a landowner can establish that a squatter is working as an agent or is just acting under the true owner’s permission, the squatter loses their claim of squatter’s rights to the property as well. Lastly, the squatter must make uninterrupted use of the property in a continuous manner.

The only way to establish squatter’s rights, otherwise known as adverse possession, is to meet every one of these requirements. As a true property owner, it is incredibly wise to learn these rules to establishing squatter’s rights by squatters or holdover tenants so you know how to most appropriately act to ensure you don’t lose title to your own land.

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