Tenants Get Boot After Unwittingly Renting Home In Foreclosure From Non-Owner

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a column in the Philadelphia Daily News reports:

• THE 'SPACIOUS' one-bedroom apartment listed in the Internet ad sounded perfect for Sherry Murphy and her 13-year-old daughter. [...] Seemed like a bargain at $130 a week. So she moved in and paid the first week's rent to a man named Kenneth Dixon, who she thought was the owner. She wasn't the first. At least five other tenants were living there and Dixon collected their rents personally every week. And then the Department of Licenses and Inspections issued a seven-page violation report and ordered the property shut down. The tenants had read about the place in an ad Dixon ran on Craigslist.

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• Dixon never owned the property. Anthony Johnson, whose wife, Dolores, is listed on the deed as the owner, says that they had no idea that Dixon had turned the place into a rooming house. [...] Johnson said that he had fallen behind five months on the $4,700-a-month mortgage by May. He said he was moving out of the house when Dixon appeared. [...] "He told me he helped people in distress. It was a blessing." They agreed that Dixon would buy the distressed property, freeing the Johnsons from foreclosure. But the lease-purchase arrangement fell through because of liens that had been levied against the property before Dixon got involved. Instead, Johnson said, Dixon agreed to pay the mortage and live in the property until the judgment was cleared and the sale could be arranged.

For more, see She thought she'd found a home, but it was all a house of cards.

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