During a court dispute over a plot in the United States, a man lost his more than $100,000 property after his neighbor asserted squatter’s rights. According to the New York Post, Burton Banks, an Atlanta-based financial planner, was required to transfer the title of the undeveloped land he inherited from his late father to Melissa Schrock due to Delaware’s little-known adverse possession legislation.
According to the publication, Mr. Burton and his husband David Barrett planned to sell the undeveloped area of land in 2021. They discovered, however, that around two-thirds of an acre, worth approximately $125,000, was being used by his neighbor, who had erected a pen for her goats on the site for decades.
Mr. Burton filed a complaint after Ms. Schrock refused to leave the farm for several weeks. He went to court to regain his property, but Ms. Schrock asserted squatter’s rights. Importantly, squatter’s rights, also known as adverse possession in the law, allow anyone to claim ownership of land that is not lawfully theirs by inhabiting it for at least 20 years in Delaware.
“It’s just always been my backyard since I was a little kid,” Ms. Schrock said, as per Delaware Online.
Mr. Burton was ordered to transfer the title of the property in February by the Delaware Supreme Court
Once a Delaware Supreme Court judge found that his neighbor, Melissa Schrock, had a claim to the property, Mr. Burton was ordered to transfer the title in February. The judge found that Mr. Burton and his wife lived mostly in Atlanta and “very seldom” visited the Delaware location. Their brief visit to the state made it difficult to persuade the courts that Ms. Schrock had not freely used the land for several decades.
Mr. Burton has stated that he cannot afford to file an appeal at this time, but he hopes that he can at least warn others. He disclosed that his father bequeathed an adjacent land to Ms. Schrock’s mother, who died and left the property to her daughter. Another neighbor had an animal enclosure that encroached on the land, but unlike Ms. Schrock, that person agreed to have it removed.