Baltimore Ground Rent

[Mark McGarry]

This is very Baltimore specific - fellow Baltimore real estate owners, what is your experience with ground rent?  Do you pay it with escrow or just directly to lease owner? 

I just found that a ground rent owner is required to sell to a property owner and that the sale price is set by law.  For me this would work out to a breakeven point of about 8.5 years.  Based purely on this, I'm inclined to buy out the ground rent owner just to simplify our lives. 

Does anyone have any idea what this would do to resale value of the home - owning the actual property outright as opposed to owning the building and ground renting?

[Rich Baer]

@Mark McGarry

Responding to the errors in the prior post. You can no longer create ground rents. Also you still can lose your house if you don't pay your ground rent. When the recent landmark ground rent case ruling came down, it allowed for ground rent suits to once again be filed. Also, ground rents are extremely popular as an investment and many people still pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for large packages. You are right in the fact that the State was trying to curtail ground rents. However, the Courts ruled that the State's attempt to do so was unconstitutional. I actually gave a deposition in the case on the side of the ground rent owners.