If I pay the tax bill, and maintenance fees, can it be my house?I have a mystery at a house I can see from my back yard.
This house must have been a vacation home for someone. For approximately 15 years, I used to see a couple of ladies (did not know them at all) show up a couple of weeks a year at this house and those ladies were the only people I've ever seen go in that house. The house has never been rented, just got an annual visit from these two ladies. The house was well kept, had the grass mowed every week, got painted once, had a roof put on after a hurricane, etc. A year or so ago, the maintenance stopped and the house has been sitting there neglected. I thought that maybe it had been foreclosed on but I kept looking for it to show up for sale and it never has. So finally, yesterday I started digging in the public records to see what was going on. I did not see a foreclosure notice but I did find a notice and some charges from the county for having to mow the grass. Also the tax bill from last year has not been paid. Then I dug further and found that this house was left to a lady in 1996 (probably one of the ladies that showed up every year) and has never had a mortgage. So the house is fully paid for and is probably not too far away from being seized by the county and sold at auction. So, what the hell is going on here? No one is going to let house with no mortgage worth $200,000 just get seized. If the lady died, wouldn't the kids swoop down and sell it? If she was sick with medical bills, wouldn't someone sell it to pay the bills? Is it possible that no one knows this house exists? I'm really puzzled over this.
Just think.......we could be neighbors!!