Hundreds of people score free homes under squatter’s rights law
DOZENS of people in NSW are scoring free properties each year by exploiting archaic squatter’s rights laws. It comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed a man claimed an empty property in Sydney after he stumbled across it, changed the locks and rented it out.
NSW
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DOZENS of people in NSW are scoring free properties each year by exploiting archaic squatter’s rights laws.
New statistics obtained by The Daily Telegraph can reveal there have been 230 successful “adverse possession” claims since 2013, with 36 in the past year alone.
It comes after we this week revealed Sydney property developer Bill Gertos had claimed squatter’s rights laws on an empty property in Ashbury after he stumbled across it 20 years ago, changed the locks and started renting it out.
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The home, at 6 Malleny St, is now worth $1.7 million. The story attracted headlines around the globe, with even the UK’s BBC reporting on the bizarre case.
Adverse possession — better known as squatter’s rights — is a law that allows individuals to take ownership of a property if they have been in control of it for more than 12 years without permission of the “truthful owners”.
It dates back to the UK’s Statutes of Limitation 1623 and is one of the many principles our legal system inherited from Britain.
From October 2017 to October this year the NSW Land Registry Services received 84 squatter’s rights applications, with 36 emerging successful. From 2016-2017 there were 76 applications with 53 successful.
But NSW Registrar-General Jeremy Cox said these applications for whole parcels of land by strangers were rare.
“Most applications are made for residue strips left over after subdivision,” Mr Cox said. “They are also used to solve ownership problems where transfers have been lost or deceased estates left unadministered for many years.”
He said to claim squatter’s rights an individual must be able to prove they had been in possession of the land for more than 12 years and that they had acted like the owner of the land in that time, paying rates and maintaining the property.