I'm sorry this has happened to you. We have a neighbor who has been off island for awhile and I've been keeping their place looking lived in, mowing, etc, and I walk my dogs down there every day to make sure it's still vacant. My plan is if I encounter somebody explain to them that if they don't leave I'm coming back with the police. And then call the neighbor and tell him he'd better get on the next flight over because I don't run an eviction service.
I hope you have a speedy resolution to this serious problem and I hope you will be posting a good outcome soon. What did the police say?
"squatters rights require 20 uninterrupted years of occupation AND they have to pay the property taxes"
There is general misunderstanding that paying property taxes opens the doorway for eventual ownership for a squatter, and in some rare cases that happens, but squatters have no rights. The adverse possession laws were intended to protect a person who believes they have legal right to the land, not to give squatters the perception of having rights that they do not. An example might be if my wife and I bought a house together, but only my name was on the deed, but we weren't legally married. Then I passed away and the wife continued running the homestead. After 20 years she could legally get the property transferred to her name because anybody claiming to be an heir had 20 years to try and claim an inheritance. Of course the property taxes have to be paid because the county would have already taken and auctioned the property long before the 20 years were up anyway. Another example is an elderly farmer who hires a ranch hand with the understanding that in exchange for services, the ranch hand would take over the property when the owner dies. There are plenty of examples for homesteaders, sharecroppers, etc. A third example is when a person is occupying land that they think is theirs but due to a misunderstanding, bad surveying, or some other reason it turns out the property wasn't actually theirs. This was more common when the government used to give land away under homesteading laws. A lot of the land was never occupied and developed as required by whoever got the land grant and if it was abandoned for 20 years whoever accidentally wound up there had a pathway to ownership.
I hope you have a speedy resolution to this serious problem and I hope you will be posting a good outcome soon. What did the police say?
"squatters rights require 20 uninterrupted years of occupation AND they have to pay the property taxes"
There is general misunderstanding that paying property taxes opens the doorway for eventual ownership for a squatter, and in some rare cases that happens, but squatters have no rights. The adverse possession laws were intended to protect a person who believes they have legal right to the land, not to give squatters the perception of having rights that they do not. An example might be if my wife and I bought a house together, but only my name was on the deed, but we weren't legally married. Then I passed away and the wife continued running the homestead. After 20 years she could legally get the property transferred to her name because anybody claiming to be an heir had 20 years to try and claim an inheritance. Of course the property taxes have to be paid because the county would have already taken and auctioned the property long before the 20 years were up anyway. Another example is an elderly farmer who hires a ranch hand with the understanding that in exchange for services, the ranch hand would take over the property when the owner dies. There are plenty of examples for homesteaders, sharecroppers, etc. A third example is when a person is occupying land that they think is theirs but due to a misunderstanding, bad surveying, or some other reason it turns out the property wasn't actually theirs. This was more common when the government used to give land away under homesteading laws. A lot of the land was never occupied and developed as required by whoever got the land grant and if it was abandoned for 20 years whoever accidentally wound up there had a pathway to ownership.