A Delco couple selling their home discovered they don’t own the whole property

Rebecca and Joseph O’Connor received some staggering news in September days from completing the sale of their Delaware County home: They don’t technically own half of their front yard.

Their buyer’s title company found two parcels of land on the site. The O’Connors learned that in the mid-1960s, a previous owner bought one parcel, and then a couple of years later, he bought the second. He never legally merged them. After he died, his wife sold the home in the 1980s to someone who then sold it to the O’Connors. Neither buyer knew they hadn’t purchased the rights to more than 500 square feet of yard.

The revelation jeopardized the sale of the two-bedroom home in Wallingford, which the O’Connors and their three boys have outgrown. They had already packed away their lives and planned to use the money from the sale to buy the home they’d chosen as a better fit. Rebecca, an administrative assistant, and Joseph, an HVAC specialist, were first-time home buyers when they purchased in 2018. They never thought something like this could happen to them.

» READ MORE: Unclear ownership impedes upkeep and sale of houses in Philly. The city is working on a solution.

“It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, it’s catastrophic,” said Lance Rogers, a real estate attorney working with the O’Connors.

Issues surrounding ownership, or title, of a property can derail home sales and repairs and the passing of wealth through generations. In Philadelphia alone, more than 10,400 properties have unclear legal ownership, which threatens more than $1 billion in household wealth. Most tangled titles occur when a homeowner dies and the deed for an entire property does not transfer to a new owner. But unclear property ownership can take many forms and have various causes.

Snags in the line of succession can be costly and difficult to straighten out. Many times, tangled titles prevent home sales. But sometimes sales go through even with problems with the title, as happened when the O’Connors purchased their home.

After some of the shock and confusion wore off, the O’Connors spent months frantically searching for the property’s heirs and working with their lawyer. They were making progress when their buyer, tired of waiting for a resolution, pulled out around the holidays. The O’Connors lost the house they were set to buy. Their title insurance has denied their claim.

“I felt kind of hopeless for a while,” Rebecca O’Connor, 30, said. “Everything was falling into place and then just everything exploded out of nowhere.”

They had thought selling and buying at the same time would be the hardest part of moving. The knowledge they’ll have to go through it all again adds stress to an already overwhelming situation.

Their lawyer found the former owner’s three daughters, who didn’t know they have legal claim to the stray piece of property. He’s asking them to yield their rights to it by signing a quitclaim corrective deed. That would immediately solve the O’Connors’ problem. The other option — filing a quiet title action in court — costs thousands of dollars and takes more than a year to complete.

The O’Connors remain in limbo while they wait.

Home buyers shouldn’t rely on title companies to tell them everything they need to know about ownership of a property.

“There’s only so much that a title search can reveal,” said Scott Rothman, a Conshohocken-based real estate attorney and title agent.

Title companies search for the chain of ownership of a residential property, typically going back 60 years, to ensure there are no breaks. They make sure the seller of the home is the legal owner. They look for liens and court claims against the property, unpaid taxes, easements, and bankruptcies. Searches typically take about a week.

» READ MORE: A title search can make or break your closing

Title companies do not visit the property and are not responsible for ensuring that boundaries match the buyer’s expectations. They look at deeds, which include legal descriptions and general boundaries of parcels that don’t say where buildings sit on them.

“That title search isn’t going to tell you really anything about where improvements are situated, where a house is located on a property, where a driveway is, where a fence is, where trees are, where a shed is, a garage,” said Rothman, attorney at Curley & Rothman and owner of Spring Mill Settlement Services.

During a property transaction, “there are a lot of opportunities for mistakes to be made and for things to happen that will call into question this huge investment,” said Rogers, the O’Connors’ attorney who is also a title agent and owner of Legalty in Ardmore.

“Can you imagine someone spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their house and they’re homeless?” he said. “It happens.”

» READ MORE: Tangled titles in Philly threaten more than $1.1 billion in generational wealth

Homeowners usually don’t discover something is wrong with their title until many years after the problem originated, when people involved are deceased or difficult to find. Rothman once needed corrective deeds from four prior owners to straighten out a client’s title.

A case came in to his office the other day in which two neighboring homeowners in Berks County have deeds for each other’s houses, not their own.

“Does this happen all the time? No, but it can happen,” he said.

Some clients a couple of years ago bought a house in Lower Merion and found out later that their property line went down the middle of their driveway, Rothman said. An attorney or land surveyor could have caught that, he said.

G. Windsor Tracy, president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Pennsylvania Society of Land Surveyors, said the vast majority of Pennsylvanians don’t hire a surveyor as part of buying a home.

“One of the biggest problems I see, especially with new home buyers, they’re looking at the home, they have a general idea of what they’re purchasing, and they’re relying on the Realtor or seller to say, ‘This is what you own,’” he said.

In the O’Connors’ case, their real estate agent had never heard of anything like what the family was facing.

If there’s any uncertainty about property lines or if home buyers want to be cautious, they should consider hiring a surveyor. That typically happens only to prevent or fight boundary conflicts when a property owner wants to put up a fence, build a shed, or landscape, and neighbors dispute property lines, Tracy said.

Rothman worked on a case in Washington Township, Gloucester County, in which a seller purposefully didn’t tell a buyer that land behind the home was owned by the municipality. The new homeowners didn’t learn it was a preserved wetland until they tried to build a pool in what they thought was their backyard.

“I was very naive in buying a house,” Rebecca O’Connor said, “because I figured people would steer us in the right direction and explain things to us thoroughly.”

Home buyers rarely read through or understand the mountain of paperwork involved in real estate transactions, Rogers said. They may want to consider hiring a real estate attorney if they don’t.

Hiring an attorney or surveyor is probably the only way to catch something like the O’Connors’ situation, Rothman said. He usually charges home buyers about $1,500, which often gets rolled into closing costs.

Regardless, home buyers should try to be involved in every aspect of the sale, asking questions of title companies and others, and looking out for things that don’t seem right, such as the dimensions of their properties.

One of Rothman’s clients thought they had bought a South Philadelphia home that stretched from Kater Street to Bainbridge Street. The client didn’t realize a legal description of the property was inaccurate.

“They basically only bought half a house,” he said.