Homeowner Spends Thousand$ To Regain Control Of House Held Out For Rent After Adverse Possession-Claiming Crackpot Commandeered Control Of Temporarily-Unoccupied Premises

In Miami, Florida, WFOR-TV Channel 4 reports:

• Carlos Mejeas can’t forget the shock of finding a woman named Michele Bell and a half dozen other strangers living in his six bedroom Miami house, which was on the market for rent.
  
  “I almost had a heart attack. I came to the house she was here. Fifteen people were here,” Mejeas told CBS4 Chief Investigator Michele GIllen.
  
  But finding her living there was just the beginning of his nightmare.
  
  Bell didn’t want to just live in Mejeas’ house, she wanted to own it. According to documents filed with the Miami Dade Property Appraisers office, she had filled out a one page form and applied to adverse possess the house.

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• For someone to legally adverse possess a property, it needs to be abandoned and the applicant needs to pay property taxes for 7 years. A CBS4 investigation finds that is rarely the case, and in fact many of the homes people are moving into and filed adverse possession for are owned by another party who is current with paying taxes on the property.
  
  In fact, just recently and for the first time, the Miami Dade Property Appraisers Office did a cross check with the Tax Collectors office and found that nearly half of all recent adverse possession applications were invalid and were immediately voided because the taxes were current.
  
  CBS4 investigators visited dozens of houses across Miami-Dade and Broward whose addresses we found on documents filed with the property appraiser’s offices.
  
  One such house happens to be located directly across the street from the home of Carlos Mejeas. Mejeas said he finally got his house back after spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to go to court to try and get Michele Bell and her acquaintances out of his house.

For more, see Adverse Possession Loophole Creating Headaches For Homeowners.