Adverse Possession

It's official! We have finally divested ourselves of property interests in Ohio. The last property we owned was sold on October 28, 2016. Over 10 years and many hundreds of credit score points later, we only own our own house where we currently live.

In 2005, Carly and I were getting serious and I was getting tired of living in my little apartment. We found a house in North Hill, Akron, and bought the thing. Even though I was basically an unemployed law student. That was the housing bubble.

A year or two later, our neighbors, a kind of odd Akron hillbilly type family (last name, "Dick") were foreclosed on and no one was surprised. Since we thought we were going to stay in Akron forever, Carly and I bought the place thinking that we could renovate it, turn it into a rental, and maybe, eventually, a law office. We got it for a great price and a line of credit for renovations and repairs.

All of this money came from Portage Community Bank, the bank from my old hometown where my father owned stock and I knew the president and his kids. They rode the wave of the housing bubble just like everyone else, so two houses for a law student with no appreciable income was no big deal.

We rented the one house to friends and lived in the other. Things were peachy. Then Carly got a job in her hometown and I failed the bar exam. We moved to Mount Vernon and rented our house out to some people.

They wrecked it. Dog peed all over the place, boyfriend cut holes in 100-year-old solid wood doors to make a "music studio." Girl stopped paying rent and we asked her to leave before we evicted her. After that, our friends were getting a divorce and decided to stop living in our second property, also. So we got a management company to fill the places.

We went through a series of renters that we hoped would pan out, and each time, they did a little more damage to the house. Or a lot of damage. My cousin, Ricky, and his friends put basketball sized holes in the walls. Police were called to the property a few times. In the other house, the family stopped paying rent entirely for a few months, and then their daughter died from a heroin overdose. After almost a year of not receiving rent, we had to evict them. The last renters in the second property were resettled refugees. When they finally left, the house was so filthy there was an inches-deep cockroach infestation and the woman I hired to clean the place got sick a few feet inside the front door and refused to go back.

Good news is, we eventually sold both properties. Both of them were sold with massive losses and for less than we owed. After the housing bubble collapsed in 2008 and 2009, and while Carly and I were relocating to New Jersey, we tried to get the bank to foreclose on the properties. We really really wanted to abandon them and let them slide, but the bank convinced us to stay on, reduced our payments, and "helped" us by charging off some of the loans.

Unfortunately, by writing them off, they stayed on our credit report as charged-off debt that was not satisfied, so for six years we had to make payments on the charged off amounts until the bank considered them satisfied. They still contend they did the best thing for us. I think it was for them. But, due to them kind of screwing us on the charged-off amounts, they were more amenable to agreeing to sell the properties in modified short sales, and now we just have to pay off remaining balances of the loans rather than take the tax and credit hits of short sales.

The losses on the properties are mitigated by the awfully complex tax code. Since we didn't live in the houses and treated them as rentals, the costs of selling the houses and the losses we incurred are deductible expenses. We will recoup about half of our losses just in tax returns last year and next year. It's not the best thing in the world, but it helps.

So today I was checking to make sure we got all the final bills for our utilities at the last property we sold, and found that on the property records, my current address in Maryland is still listed as the mailing address. After three phone calls to the Summit County Fiscal Office, I found that I have no ability to change the record because I don't own the property. The new owners have to do that. And since the transaction was all arms' length, I don't have a way to reach them. So... best to hope for is that our agent can call their agent and get them to fix it. Otherwise, their tax bill goes in the trash! Hooray!

By this time next year, all of our obligations on the properties should be gone. All the debt paid, all the notices updated. I won't have any fiscal ties with Ohio any longer. That'll be nice.