Property developer win home after winning squatter’s rights case
A PROPERTY developer has got his hands on a million-dollar home for absolutely nothing after emerging victorious in a bizarre case. He stumbled across the home 20 years ago and has now struck property gold.
NSW
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A PROPERTY developer has got his hands on a million-dollar home for absolutely nothing after emerging victorious in a bizarre squatter’s rights case.
Developer and tax agent Bill Gertos stumbled across the empty house in Ashbury 20 years ago and began to put into motion a series of events that have culminated in him striking property gold.
Over two decades he changed the locks, renovated the house and started renting it out — despite not being the legal owner of 6 Malleny St. And it is this that has now allowed him to claim the house under squatter’s rights.
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It is an arcane law that allows for individuals to be granted ownership of properties if they have openly occupied it for more than 12 years without permission of the owners. It usually applies to people who “take possession” by moving into the home.
Mr Gertos told the NSW Supreme Court he discovered the house, now estimated to be worth $1.7 million, in 1998 after visiting a client who lived on the same street.
Noticing it appeared empty, he asked around and was told the elderly woman who lived there had died.
After knocking on the front door, Mr Gertos entered the house through the back door which was “hanging off its hinges” and found it empty but filled with rubbish and old furniture.
The next day he paid a builder to install new locks and renovated the home. He then started renting it out.
After doing this for more than 19 years, Mr Gertos last year made an application to the NSW Registrar-General to claim squatter’s rights on the property and be listed as its owner on the titles.
In October 2017, the Registrar-General gave notice of its intention to grant the application made by Mr Gertos but was served an injunction by the family of Henry Thompson Downie, a deceased man who had bought the property in 1927.
They argued Mr Gertos had not possessed the property in an “open manner”, as is required by squatter’s rights, because he had not moved into the property but just rented it out.
However, yesterday the Supreme Court found that Mr Gertos’s possession of the property had been “open, not secret; peaceful, not by force; and adverse, not by consent of the true owner” as required by squatter’s right laws.
The court discharged the injunction blocking the Registrar-General from registering him as the owner and ordered the family to pay costs.