• arrow74@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    Disagree, my grandfather’s home has set vacant for nearly 4 years now after his passing. The estate cannot be wrapped up due to my estranged uncle not believing the property is worthless.

    The county keeps upping the tax assessment, and so he’s convinced it’s worth something and refuses to visit the preoperty.

    On paper this is an unused house in reality the roof finally fell in about 6 months after my grandfather died. The county refuses to condem it because they want the tax revenue and my estranged uncle has held up the estate indefinitely with unrealistic expectations.

    I wouldn’t say my poor as fuck family deserve a 100% annual tax on the assessed value of a near worthless asset.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 days ago

      I imagine the options would be to pay the tax or just, I dunno, get rid of the property? You said it’s worthless.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        I mean, he plainly explained that there’s a son bogging down the estate over the house. He might have said “worthless” but I’m sure it’s more like some land value and essentially zero structure value, so they might want to get a few thousand, while he blocks that transaction holding out for ten-fold. He also asserts the county tax assessments are not consistent with market value, and I think most people who have dealt with tax assessments can relate to the disconnect between realistic market value and tax assessment, one way or the other.

        Or even if they did say “fine, you know what, take the property and we’ll take the rest and you can deal with trying to extract the value you think there is”, if he doesn’t agree to that you can’t really force it short of fully disclaiming yourself out of the entire estate. So if the man had $200k in other assets, then that would be an expensive thing to forfeit for the sake of not dealing with a busted house on a bit of land.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        It’s a common problem with estates though even if 4/5 people want to sell it for whatever they can get, that 1 person can keep it in limbo for a very long time. If there wasn’t a will or trust that explicitly gave someone power (and even if there is in some cases), a few years of nothing happening isn’t actually outside the norm.

      • arrow74@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        The house is, the land does have some value even after demolition costs. Basically uncle thinks it’s worth 200,000. In reality it’s worth 40,000, maybe a bit less.

        Also my parents have their trailer (does not belong to the estate) on the property. They’d love to settle it, but 1 party refuses.

        This plan would actually make my parents homeless as they can’t afford to purchase anything else or rent anywhere near where they live. If they could at least divide the proceeds of the land sale they might be able to afford something. This proposed tax would break them

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          Based on my experience, you managed to described like every rural estate situation I’ve ever seen. Household living in a trailer towed onto their parents land. That household probably doing a lot to take care of their parents. Then the parents die and suddenly some relative no one has heard from in decades comes along to really screw things up, often from an urban area with zero concept of the market realities of a poorly mantained house on rural land.

          I get the whole “hoarding sucks” but it’s really only an urban problem. Go to a rural area and you can find plenty of housing stock for cheap.

    • The_Caretaker@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      What if it caught on fire? An insurance company won’t insure a house without a roof. It has zero value as it is. The land it sits on is still worth something. You should have it appraised with the collapsed roof and see if your taxes go down.

      • arrow74@lemm.ee
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        6 days ago

        County appraisers refused to drop the value. They like their tax revenue

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value’s vacancy tax.

      Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k… but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.

      Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.

      I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the … non idiot uncle parties to the estate.

      I don’t know for certain of course as I don’t know your locale, but… you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?

      Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so… from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.

      … Or have ya’ll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?