$9100 for a small strip of land instead of a Villa

[Jay Weathersby]

It pays to do your homework before forking out your money. This guy thought he was getting an amazing deal instead purchased a strip of land between to villas. I tied not to laugh while reading this, but it was tough.

He thought he snagged a villa for $9,100. He got a foot-wide strip of land

Kerville Holness thought he’d done a great job snapping up a $177,000 Tamarac villa for only $9,100.

But that’s not what he actually bought during a Broward online auction of properties that had defaulted on their taxes.

He got a 1-foot-wide, 100-foot-long strip of land on Northwest 100th Way — valued at $50.

It starts at the curb where two mailboxes have been installed, goes under the wall separating the garages of two adjoining Spring Lake villas, then extends out to the back of the lot.

And officials say he’s stuck with the deal.

So what can Holness do now? Make the people living there get their mailboxes off his grass? Remove the water meters that are in his ground? Maybe try to charge rent to both villas for the joint wall and roof that sit on his land?

“If I’m vindictive enough, I can cut right through the garage wall and the home to get to my air space, but what use would that be to me?” Holness said.

What he wants is for the county to void the deal and give him his money back.

“It’s deception,” said Holness, a first-time auction bidder from Tamarac. “There was no demarcation to show you it’s just a line going through [the villa duplex], even though they have the tools to show that.”

Holness said that property appraiser pictures linked to the auction site showed the villa as being the parcel he was bidding on.

But the appraiser’s site and information on the county’s tax site also show the negligible value of the property, that there is no building value, that the land takes up only 100 square feet and that the property is one-foot wide.

Officials say state law does not allow the refund Holness is seeking.

The message from county officials and real estate experts is that auction participants need to do their homework and make sure they’ve checked for all possible problems a property might have.

“He may go to court and find some error in the sale procedure,” said Gary Singer, a real estate attorney who writes a weekly column for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Generally speaking, he bought what he was supposed to have bought.”

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-ne-tax-auction-leaves-buyer-hurting-20190615-d573l2aw7nbk7hgf4y2d36qcoy-story.html