squatters

I was just thinking earlier, after reading in the paper about squatters. I know theres some truths and some non-truths about it, so thought id double check on this. since everyone i know isnt too clear about it either. but is it true that if you're not home one day, someone can come into your house,change the locks and claim it as their own?
 
i was reading about this guy who went to work one morning,  he remembered he forgot his wallet, so went back home, and in the time he left,squatters had come in,and was in the process of changing the locks. and he actually had to take them to court to get his home back!

this whole "squatters rights" thing doesnt make sense to me, and was hoping someone who clarify what exactly they have the "right" to do

Thanks for the task

http://www.landlordzone.co.uk/squatters.htm

"Squatting is when someone occupies an empty or abandoned property without the owner's permission, often without his knowledge and without any normal legal right to do so."

So no there are no rights at all for someone going into someone's property that is currently being lived in. The rights are designed for someone who has lived a period of time at a property without a proper agreement.
The link above describes things nicely, I think.

haha no probs, hg, glad i am giving you something to do!

Even so, the squatter has rights. Squatters cannot be legally evicted from premises without a court order. It may even be worthwhile to invest some money by offering to pay for temporary accommodation and removals, if you can establish some sort of raport, and pursuade them to go quickly.

thats insane, so basically, you either have to take them to court or give them money to leave your property!l

thats insane, so basically, you either have to take them to court or give them money to leave your property!l

Well yes and no, it does say if you find them early on that you can call the police and have them removed. I think it is designed for when someone is actually established living in a place. I would imagine it was designed to protect people who have verbal agreements to live somewhere and then someone wants them to move right away. It is saying that once someone has an established home (after two weeks of living somewhere) then you have to use proper channels to move them out--which is taking them to court --or coming to an agreement.
I don't think that is completely unreasonable, although I do see where it can be taken advantage of if someone has property that isn't checked on regularly.

The law's quite good, really, seeing that it's do with discouraging landlords from keeping housing off the market. It was (and still could be) quite a problem in such a crowded little island. If the owner of the property can demonstrate they live there, then the squatters can be evicted.

It was a very big issue after the war because millions of houses had been destroyed in the bombing, meaning that millions of families were homeless, living in barracks (if they were lucky) or, just as common, in tents with open fires - hardly what soldiers, sailors and airmen who'd just fought across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East for six years should come back to. Despite that, there were quite a few empty properties held by landlords who weren't, often because of rent controls, leasing out the buildings or because they were upper class dwellings for an upper class which had effectively ceased to exist due to the war. So, people sorted out the issue on their own terms (with the help of the Communist Party) and took over the buildings. A rather nice solution, all in all and one which the government accepted as a good way of taking the pressure off a construction industry which was struggling with the task of rebuilding the country. It also punished landlords, and the Labour govt back then didn't give a hoot what they thought.

Because of the laws sorted out around then, if squatters have held the property for 12 years, then a court will grant them the deeds to the property. They can't break into the property and they need to demonstrate it was unoccupied, but, by and large, if those two conditions are met, then the squatters can stay and the landlord is stuck. The interpretation has moved against squatters over the years, but England still has amongst the most pro-squatter laws in the world.

To get around this, there's actually a neat little black-market in landlords who offer dramatically reduced/zero rents to people who're willing to live in buildings which don't comply with the law and will be redone in the future, but which are (for the moment) unoccupied and so legally vulnerable to squatting.

Hi there,

This topic has sort of popped up before, and although I see the legality side of it, in practice sometimes when squatters have taken over your property and also when they previously rented and stop paying the landlord for whatever reason, it's not a nice place to be if as the landlord you get left out of pocket becuase the law is so skewed towards the consumer in the UK. Thankfully it's personally not happened to me, but all I can say is I've heard of landlords ensuring the squatters are removed from their properties and clearly told not to return.

It's a farce when that kind of stuff happens as plenty of squatters seem to know their rights but also conveniently forget about their morals.

Cheers! DtM! West London & Slough UK!

Wasn't there some guy who endedd up owning a mansion in Hampstead after squatting in it for years? The owners had gone off overseas for a number of years and the courts said they'd abandoned it and because thisguy had been there for x amount of time it was now his. I forget how long he'd been there, about 20 years or something.

ETA - found it - it was a plot of land not a mansion http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-457222/Tramp-given-2m-Hampstead-Heath-plot-squatting-land-20-years.html

I believe it must be similar to the system in the US. I owned a property that I inherited when my father died and some squatters moved in. I had to file for an eviction notice, giving her a certain amount of time to leave before being forced out. I ended up spending quite a bit of money in attorney fees to get her out, basically. And she completely trashed the place, so the police wanted to press charges on me for illegal dumping until I explained everything that had happened and they put the charges on her instead (since they found some bills and her old drivers licence in a trash pile  ) From the sounds of it, it would be a similar set up here. You have to evict a squatter just as though they were a legal tenant, unfortunately.