Landlord Charged w/Reviving Rental Scam
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This so called landlord has just spent a year in jail for renting houses he didn’t own.
But that wasn’t enough to deter a 52 year old man in West Palm Beach bent on renting out homes he doesn’t own.
Claiming he is backed by an obscure Florida law pertaining to abandoned and vacant property, Carl Heflin again has attempted to take homes via adverse possession and rent them to unwitting tenants, according to Palm Beach County sheriff’s investigators.
Following a July release from the Palm Beach County Jail, Heflin filed adverse possession papers on four homes, renting one and accepting $2,500 from a tenant to begin a three-year lease.
This guy was arrested again this September for burglary, organized scheme to defraud and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
He used his 17 year old daughter to break windows to get into empty homes so her father could change the locks, says the sheriff’s report.
Adverse possession allows someone to file a claim of ownership on a property, and attempt to gain permanent ownership after possessing it for seven years, including paying taxes and caring for the property. (which I doubt he ever did)
This law was created hundreds of years ago when hand-scrawled property records could more easily be lost or damaged. Allowing for adversed possession kept land in productive use when ownership was unclear, or, for example, the owner died with no heirs.
Today, property records are tangled in the massive market meltdown, where mortgage notes were sold and resold, bundled into securities, scanned into computers, divided among several investors and just plain lost. Have you seen the latest where banks are stopping foreclosure proceedings??
“This is the ideal opportunity for adverse possession because titles are clouded”, said a senior attorney, Kama Monroe, for Florida’s Dept. of Revenue.
“No one is sure who to call to say, ‘Get them off my land’ “ In the case of this home Heflin has rented, the owner did appear.
According to the property appraiser’s office Relatives had been living at the house until Aug. 2009 when a kitchen fire made the home unlivable. Foreclosure papers were filed in Nov. 2009 and the home had remained vacant.
That is, until Heflin began filing more adverse possession documents with the palm beach County Appraiser’s office, following his release from jail. The appraiser’s office confirmed he has recently claimed adverse possession on four homes.
For the past year, while he was in jail Heflin also allegedly attempted to collect rent from tenants who have been living in homes he originally rented to them.
So he was given a misdemeanor trespassing charge and since he had already spent 13 months in prison and the victims or owners of the properties were either unavailable or unwilling to appear for trial. He was released.
Excerpts taken from an article in the Palm Beach Post Sept. 9, 2010
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