$16 House

$16 House, Man who paid $16 for house evicted. Texas squatter had said he could take over $340,000 home using the 'adverse possession' law. But the bank who held the mortgage took him to court and won.

Remember the guy in Texas who bought a $340,000 house for $16?

He apparently won't get to keep it. Bank of America, which held a $409,206 mortgage on the home, moved to evict Kenneth Robinson. After a Monday court hearing, which he didn't attend, he was ordered to vacate within a week.


"I'm glad this finally took place," Chris Custard, a neighbor who came to Monday's hearing, told the Star Local News. "But it's sad that they have to wait a week. Nobody was happy with him being there."


Custard said neighbors saw vans at the house this weekend and thought Robinson may

have moved out.

Robinson refused to tell reporters where he was moving, but said he is no longer advising people to do what he did. "It's been a huge learning experience," he told reporters in a phone call later, according to The Associated Press.

"The truth is I don't want people to think that they should go out there and do anything based on what I did," he told AP last week. "Whether they do it or whether they're not is solely up to them."

Robinson could appeal the decision, but he would have to put up a $8,917 bond, a lot more than the $16 he spent to take over the house in Flower Mound, a suburb of Dallas. He did get free rent for more than six months.

Robinson claimed the house using the legal doctrine of "adverse possession," which is usually used to decide boundary disputes, though it can be used to determine ownership of abandoned property that has been "openly and notoriously" used by someone else for a set period of years.

Since Robinson moved into the house last summer, he has instructed others in how to take over homes using the same legal technique. He even put up a website, 16dollarhouse.com, where he sold an ebook with instruction on how to take over a house using adverse possession. (We got error messages when we tried to look at various pages of the site Monday afternoon.)

In nearby Tarrant County, a number of people were arrested after trying to take over vacant houses. In one case, someone tried to take over the house of a woman who was merely away for a few weeks on vacation. District Attorney John Shannon said Texas law on adverse possession does not apply to squatters taking over empty homes.



"Some of these people are saying, 'Once we file the affidavit, that gives me the house,'" Shannon told WFAA-TV. "And that is not right."

Source:http://realestate.msn.com/blogs/listed-loans.aspx?post=b4427040-2596-4fcd-ba77-249edc3f48a2