Land advice

stator

If you try and 'steal' the land the person who is the legal owner will probably be less likely to sell it to you.
If someone tried to do it to me I wouldn't sell to them, I would put it up for sale and instruct the agents not to sell to you.

Bonfire_Bride

What are you planning on doing with the land once you get legal possession? You could build a castle!


It has been done before.

Paulg1986

Hello, i have ordered a will and probate for his uncle and hopefully i can find out the nephews name or something i can use to get more information, i should receive it today. I know most of his uncles family are originally from Australia

Paulg1986

We are hoping in the long term future to build a home in the same footprint as the bungalow that is there

Paulg1986

I am not trying to steal it, it is in a horrible state and will get worst if i cant get to track down the uncles nephew putting a fence up and tyding it for 10 years and keeping some animals on there wont do any harm

Paulg1986

Also if somebody did turn up at some point and instructed the estate agent not to sell it to me, whats stops my wife or me asking somebody to buy it for me??

Richard_Webster

In order to gain adverse possession you have to deal with the land in a way that would make it obvious to the "real" owner (if he showed up) that someone else was trying to claim it.

Just fencing would probably not be enough if it is a large area. Running stock on it or growing crops are more likely acts of adverse possesion because the real owner would be asking whose cattle they were or who had sown the crops.

stator

Paulg1986 wrote: »

I am not trying to steal it, it is in a horrible state and will get worst if i cant get to track down the uncles nephew putting a fence up and tyding it for 10 years and keeping some animals on there wont do any harm

In effect you are stealing it. It does have an owner and trying to use adverse possession would be taking it away from them without paying them. Even if they don't know they own it, it still belongs to someone.
Adverse possession was not meant to allow people to acquire land they know they don't own. It was meant to regularise the defacto status of land. It's to stop someone claiming they own your garden if you've been living there for decades and genuining thought the garden was yours. In the old deeds based system this was possible but isn't really possible once the land is registered.

Paulg1986

I am not stealing it i am going to be simply using it and if the true owner does not want to maintain it and pull the other lovely homes down around it by the state the place is in then i will stake my claim

moneyistooshorttomention

deannatrois wrote: »

This may be of no use at all, I warn you lol.

Does anyone have any idea of the nephew's name, address or any details of him at all. With some details you might then be able to search for a will.., or lack of one https://www.gov.uk/wills-probate-inheritance/searching-for-probate-records

Then you might be able to find out if the nephew had relatives who will/have inherited.

Its a long shot but might be worth trying.

Worth trying - but someone that knows how to investigate things properly.

It's easy enough to find a private investigator - just check out Yellow Pages. They are surprisingly cheap too actually and would have access to avenues you don't to trace the owner of the plot. I would imagine it's now the nephew that is the owner - and, by the sound of it, he might be looking to sell it anyway.

Another tack would be to take out a reasonable size advert in the local newspaper of the area the nephew was last heard of living in - asking for anyone with info. about his location to contact you. Quite possibly the editor of the local paper would put in a letter from you - and you could save yourself the cost of an advert.

Ditto - the location where nephew was last heard of has probably got a Facebook page for the town/city concerned and you could put up a notice on that as well and that wouldnt even cost anything.

If he's not in his last-known location any longer - someone somewhere in that location will know where he's gone.