You're viewing a single thread.
Unused housing should be taxed mercilessly.
And single-family homes should have a 100% annual tax on them, unless they are owned by an individual human/family (none of this LLC bullshit) who own only 1 house. Make a 6-month exception for inherited houses just so they can be sold, but otherwise just tax the shit out of them.
Make hoarding housing a liability.
Disagree, my grandfather's home has set vacant for nearly 4 years now after his passing. The estate cannot be wrapped up due to my estranged uncle not believing the property is worthless.
The county keeps upping the tax assessment, and so he's convinced it's worth something and refuses to visit the preoperty.
On paper this is an unused house in reality the roof finally fell in about 6 months after my grandfather died. The county refuses to condem it because they want the tax revenue and my estranged uncle has held up the estate indefinitely with unrealistic expectations.
I wouldn't say my poor as fuck family deserve a 100% annual tax on the assessed value of a near worthless asset.
I imagine the options would be to pay the tax or just, I dunno, get rid of the property? You said it's worthless.
It's a common problem with estates though even if 4/5 people want to sell it for whatever they can get, that 1 person can keep it in limbo for a very long time. If there wasn't a will or trust that explicitly gave someone power (and even if there is in some cases), a few years of nothing happening isn't actually outside the norm.
Sadly, even with a will it can take years to resolve ownership of property after a death.
I mean, he plainly explained that there's a son bogging down the estate over the house. He might have said "worthless" but I'm sure it's more like some land value and essentially zero structure value, so they might want to get a few thousand, while he blocks that transaction holding out for ten-fold. He also asserts the county tax assessments are not consistent with market value, and I think most people who have dealt with tax assessments can relate to the disconnect between realistic market value and tax assessment, one way or the other.
Or even if they did say "fine, you know what, take the property and we'll take the rest and you can deal with trying to extract the value you think there is", if he doesn't agree to that you can't really force it short of fully disclaiming yourself out of the entire estate. So if the man had $200k in other assets, then that would be an expensive thing to forfeit for the sake of not dealing with a busted house on a bit of land.
The house is, the land does have some value even after demolition costs. Basically uncle thinks it's worth 200,000. In reality it's worth 40,000, maybe a bit less.
Also my parents have their trailer (does not belong to the estate) on the property. They'd love to settle it, but 1 party refuses.
This plan would actually make my parents homeless as they can't afford to purchase anything else or rent anywhere near where they live. If they could at least divide the proceeds of the land sale they might be able to afford something. This proposed tax would break them
Based on my experience, you managed to described like every rural estate situation I've ever seen. Household living in a trailer towed onto their parents land. That household probably doing a lot to take care of their parents. Then the parents die and suddenly some relative no one has heard from in decades comes along to really screw things up, often from an urban area with zero concept of the market realities of a poorly mantained house on rural land.
I get the whole "hoarding sucks" but it's really only an urban problem. Go to a rural area and you can find plenty of housing stock for cheap.
I'm not familiar with estate law, but seeing as you state your family is living on a trailer on the land, seems like either there'd be an exception (I don't see how having essentially unused rooms on a plot of land would be a problem) or there's some other stuff going on. Maybe if they're not paying into the estate to rent the land that'd be an issue, but I have no idea how that works for land held in an estate. I wonder if 100% tax would incentivize him to sell? One way or the other either he sells or the land is repossessed because presumably the estate would not be able to cover the tax.
He's a very stubborn man, and very convinced an asset he's never seen has tremendous worth. He was apparently very disappointed that my grandfather only had $100 in his checking.
In this proposed scenario, if he does nothing he loses some money (he's doing pretty well), but then my parents become homeless through his inaction. That seems wrong.
My family lives on the land yes, but ownership of the land belongs only to the estate. No issue with a rent payment since there was never a rent payment prior to my grandfather's death.
If your family is living on the property I still don't understand how this applies? The land is in use, occupied by your family, and is not vacant. If it's zoned for single family, and a single family lives there, it's not vacant? As far as them not paying rent now, not really sure how that happens, seeing as the land is now owned by the estate, and they are livening on it for free(?). I'm not sure how that's not just legally considered squatting, unless there's an agreement for use of the land provided they maintain it in the interim, but again, not an estate lawyer, nor do I know anything about property stuff. But yea, pretty sure the proposal is not relevant to your situation. It's like considering a property with a mother in law suite vacant unless there suite is also occupied. That's not the way it would work.
My grandfather's home is vacant, my parents live in a separate trailer on the property. So that's the crux isn't it, what does vacancy mean? Because on paper this property has an occupied trailer and an unoccupied single family home. It's one "property" but the trailer and home are taxed separately by the county and owned by different people. The county does consider them seperate dwellings, unlike a mother-in-law suite.
The estate lawyer has made it clear there are no issues from my parents living on the property still and there is no expectations of payment. It's definently not squatting, 50% of the estate does belong to my parents after all.
Thank you for that information. Who would have guessed estate/property law is complicated. I would still suggest there are solutions to this sort of situation than can be reasonably addressed while still honoring the main purpose of the proposal, but I obviously would not be the person to speak on them.
Good luck to your family. I'm sorry you're dealing with that.
If 50% of the estate belongs to your parents and there's already a tax entity for the trailer, then in this example they would go to forced arbitration to draw up their portion of the land ownership and get their single family tax rebate, and the other half of the property would be the part that starts getting a vacancy tax. I'd imagine with a timeline like six months there'd be a whole lot of arbitrations in the short term to settle existing arrangements like this one. Honestly I'm curious what the land ownership looks like already for the trailer - if they can legally stay on the estate then there must be a portion of the ground that already legally belongs to them.
No part of the land is directly owned by my parents. It is owned by the estate, which is 50/50 between my parent and my uncle. Trust me if my parents owned the land under their trailer they would be a lot less stressed.
Like I said them continuing to live there is not an issue. Maybe if my uncle pressed it it would become one, but all he wants is 100k +. So he really doesn't care beyond that.
Unfortunately his wants aren't compatible with the reality of the situation.
No one has pursued a forced arbitration, and honestly I'm not sure why. Per the lawyer it seems like the property can exist in limbo indefinitely, or at least until one party forces something. It's a weird stalemate of unrealistic expectations. He wants a lot of money, but also doesn't want to pay a lawyer himself or do any work. As long as this continues my parents keep their home at least.
I don't know your country's laws, but where I live, if it's not inhabitable it is taxed way lower (and without a roof, it's definitely not inhabitable)
That's how it should be, but the county refuses to deem it uninhabitable. They like their tax revenue
On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value's vacancy tax.
Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k.... but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.
Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.
I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the ... non idiot uncle parties to the estate.
I don't know for certain of course as I don't know your locale, but... you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?
Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so... from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.
... Or have ya'll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?
6 months to offload a house is not always so easy.
I did a search around the area I grew up that is very rural and I checked 4 properties for sale, two of them under $100k and they've been listed for over a year. In urban areas there's demand, but rural areas commonly have houses just no one wants on land that no one cares about. No distant LLCs want them so they are available, but they aren't convenient to anything so no one wants them either.
That means they aren't worth 100k. Forcing people to sell them for their actual value will lower real estate prices nationwide.
Pricing of homes in food deserts has pretty much zero impact on the housing that could actually help low-income individuals.
The housing situation and relative benefits (and lack therof) to house residents in rural areas is just fundamentally distinct from the urban situation.
There are many cases where you just can’t reduce prices enough to make them sell
- my higher priced town paid Pennies on the dollar for a complex that used to be a mental hospital and housing for various challenged. No developer was willing to pay anything because of lead and asbestos remediation costs. My town was hoping to get EPA funds and didn’t so is saddled with unusable property that it also can’t afford to clean up
- the town I grew up in has been declining for decades. Many houses are well below the cost of cars but still no one willing or able to buy. Last time I checked there seemed to be a floor at $5k but there were multiple habitable houses for $5k, and no buyers
If they're not worth any money, then the tax burden of sitting on them shouldn't be high enough to be a problem. But if it is, you can sell them cheap, abandon them to government auction, replat them with neighboring cheap lots do make ag land or a large lot for an industrial or multifamily development, or more.
"I can't make a bunch of money selling or renting this lot" is not an excuse to just sit on land waiting for the value to go up.