Home needs major repairs. I will be selling home for $500.
Getting title to the abandoned home will range between $500-$1000 of lawyer fees.
Can I just sell the homes with a Bill Of Sale and tell the new owners that if they want title that they should go and file abandonment paperwork themselves?
How would you more experience guys handle this situation?
You do not own the home!
“He who sells what isn’t his’n
Must buy it back or go to prison”
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Yes, thats true. So what do you recommend to do?
I have a couple of empty homes that I don’t have title to but don’t know what to do with them.
Can I just get someone to move in the home and instead of paying me for the home, they pay me a $500 deposit for the lot and they have to deal with getting the title of the home themselves?
Talk to your state mobile home association (MHA). That’s a question that will completely depend on the state you’re in.
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Each state has a procedure for dealing with abandoned homes and you need to find out what it is. You also need to decide what you want to do with the home.
If you want it off your property, you will need to evict the home via a judicial hearing with the proper notices. Once you get a writ, you will have to arrange for the mover to remove the home. If the home is worth something, the mover will be more interested because he will be able to arrange for a sale after proper notice. If the home is not worth anything and it should be scrapped, you might be able to get the town or city to condemn the home and then you can pay to have it hauled to the dump.
If you think it is worth keeping on your property (selling or renting it), you have to get ownership through the state’s procedure for abandoned homes. In Texas, it is clearly spelled out although it is a lengthy and tedious process. You will need to follow the state’s procedures to the letter (actually letters, registered as necessary).
It is an aggravation and it is fortunate that we have had to do it only a few times. There is no shortcut if you want to do it legally. A renter has no real claim to get title. You, as the landowner and owed money for lot rent have the claim. What you propose is not legal or wise. Your renter will never get clear title except by mistake or fraud and you do not want to be in the middle of this.
The procedure to rid yourself of the home is probably more expensive than the home is worth. In summary, unless the home is truly of value, I would try to get the town/city to condemn the home as an “attractive nuisance” and a danger to the community and find out how to get the home to the dump legally after that.
I had a tenant leave her home in Arizona and head back to Mexico. The home was just barely worth rehabbing. I worked with the DMV (?) office in town. I had to send a registered letter to the lady’s address of record, fill out a few forms, wait the required length of time, have someone come out to assess the value of the home, and that was it. The worst part was that I couldn’t get a permit to start rehabbing it until the title was in my name which took, as I remember, about two weeks. Process wasn’t really all that bad.
Here’s another consideration when you are deciding whether to sell or demolish an older low value MH. When you sell a mobile home or manufactured home, you are generally selling a product. Every product you sell in the US must be reasonably fit for the purpose for which it is sold. Therefore, if you are selling an old MH and it catches fire due to a wiring defect and the tenants inside are killed, you’ve got a severe liability issue on hand. This applies even if you sold the home “as is, where is.”
For every home you sell, you should have at least a rudimentary electrical check on it to see if there are any obvious problems, then have whoever checked it put their analysis in writing. We’ve seen home fire product defect claims arise five years after the date of sale.
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