I am a very large snake and this is my dream home.
Seriously though, that isn’t just someone’s easement? How did it even end up as a separate lot?
In all honesty there are probably some perfectly reasonable official records that somehow got parsed incorrectly to give us this abomination.
My bet is that a developer bought up a huge chunk of land, and built these subdivisions on it. The roads, houses, and strip were all originally part of that property. That tiny strip is an easement owned by the HOA. It is not, nor will ever be, for sale. However Zillow didn’t know what to make of it, so just listed it as a land property and then applied its normal value calculations to the strip.
It’s listed by a realtor and the asking price is $25K. I don’t think it’s Zillow not knowing what to do, which makes this more interesting.
I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.
So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.
If you really hate someone who lives in one of those six houses, this lot affords you many opportunities for mischief.
I can’t imagine any other reason for this to exist.
It looks wide enough for a billboard to me
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Build a twitter seizure board lmao
Everything is wide enough for a billboard of you’re brave enough.
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My understanding is that this only applies if there’s no other way for the neighbor to access their own property. If the property owners can access their property from any other way (for example, from the city streets), there’s no obligation for a landowner who owns the back of the property to allow them to have a second access point.
Does my backyard neighbor owe me the right to cut across his back yard to access mine? No. I have a driveway that connects to a city street.
On the chaos angle, I’d imagine that some of those homes have built backyard gates that allow them direct private access to that park. If someone were to buy up that strip they could cut that off and basically extort each homeowner for access. It’s possible that the homeowners could claim some sort of “I’ve used this land for 20 years for access to the park argument,” but that would involve individual claims, expense, and a general PITA legal mess. And depending on the locality, it may require you to prove that you’ve done improvements to the property and a whole host of other PITA things.
Best case for those homeowners is to pay a couple of thousand each to buy the lot and come to an agreement among themselves on subdivision and/or collective maintenance and access rights.
That’s exactly what I would do - Get the neighbors to chip in and buy the lot to parcel up and add to our yards.
The perfect property for the zip line/archery enthusiast
I prefer zipline riflery
Ah yes, the American Biathlon
Zipline artillery
How about fencing? (That’s a terrible joke, I’m sorry).
Looks like someone is already built over their lot line into this space on Zillow. Good luck with the extra court battle! https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/601-Jericho-Ave-NE-Renton-WA-98059/2064096887_zpid
Is this
butterflyadverse possession?
An old municipal right of way that got turned into private property somehow.
People living in those houses should definitely be attempting adverse possession on it.
$25k for a strip of property behind 6 different $1m houses? I’d go get a loan for that if I could. Sounds like millionaires that are willing to pay to have shit NIMBY. Don’t want to pay? I’ll be doing yard work with 2 stroke machines every day to improve my property value. Then It’d be a great place for me to make metal sculptures. 15ft rusted steel monsters that take weeks’ worth of cutting with my angle grinder.
25k across six houses would be about 5k to buy the land and combine it with the existing lots. You could probably get the money together in a week. Unless there’s an asshole neighbor that doesn’t want another 20-40 sqft of land.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I’ve been trying to buy the field behind my house for a while. 5K to add in a nice dog run or accessory dwelling unit. It would be awesome. I’d but my neighbors they didn’t want and build a tall viewing platform and sell it back to them for double the cost. 😤
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I think they were kidding but at the same time I think you very fundamentally misunderstood their overall strategy.
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Get the millionaires to purchase the land behind each of their plots for $10,000 each. Start the bidding at $25,000 each.
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Yeah IANAL but it seems like there could be almost no legitimate use for this strip of land and therefore should rightfully be part of the surrounding properties.
- Buy
- Build a wall
- Add cameras
- Charge neighbours for taking down the wall and yearly fee for not building it again.
- ???
- Capitalism.
Is this what rent seeking is? I’ve always had a hard time understanding that term.
More or less? Actually it’s more like extortion as written, but generally speaking rent seeking is buying something that you can get others to pay you for regularly. Like “hey, this land has oil, I’ll buy it and lease the oil rights” or “hey, this land has a house on it that people like to live in, I’ll buy it and lease the habitation rights”.
And somehow literal rent is not classified as rent seeking
Rent seeking, but based because it’s against homeowners
Seattle. Insane property prices. Here‘s a 360 google view picture of that corner visible https://maps.app.goo.gl/33TmGtvDqdXcjpzK6?g_st=ic
Great find. Based on some relative markers, it looks like the strip is fenced in and roughly 6 foot deep. If we guess at each lot being 40 ft wide, that’s 300+ sqft added to each lot for a few grand/each house.
I would 100% go in for that, even with the brambles taking over the space. That’s a great deal in a pricey city like that.
Double those prices and you have Vancouver.
Triple them for the SF Bay Area.
Well, this is in Renton. That’s well outside of Seattle, and a city unto itself. Vancouver beats pretty much everyone, though!
I’m pretty sure I have seen a street like that in several movies.
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No, that’s Renton.
I bet a real asshole could easily quadruple their money with this.
Just negotiate with the owners of the 6.1 houses to buy all or some of the strip. Tell Bob that if he doesn’t pay $10k for the strip behind his house, that Catherine is willing to buy it, and then her back yard will wrap around his.
In a friendly world where every neighbour trusted each-other, they could split the $25k and each pay a few thousand for a very slightly larger back yard. But, home-owners being the assholes they are, you could probably get them to try to out-bid each other to cause or avoid petty squabbles.
The reality is they’re almost certainly already using that land and buying it would give you nothing because they could claim it under adverse possession. Actually taking possession of that strip would be nearly impossible.
Adverse possession isn’t that simple, and laws regarding it vary by state. In this case, it appears to be Washington state, which requires a number of things that indicate an uphill battle for anyone trying.
Among other requirements, it needs to be uninterrupted (occasional activity doesn’t count), exclusive (the true owner doesn’t use it) for ten entire years, notorious (impossible to miss if you ever are on the property, we’re talking anywhere from fencing it off to building an entire house on it) and hostile (without permission).
So in reality, if I already owned this, avoiding adverse possession on this property is as easy as visiting it once every 5-8 years and telling them to quit the area if they’re trying to elbow their way in (which resets the 10 year clock).
So yeah, not as much a free land grab as one might think.
As a potential purchaser, the greatest concern is if it’s already been more than 10 years. In my mind this is exactly the kind of situation adverse possession is for.
Even if adverse possession doesn’t apply, trying to actually evict those home owners from the land is going to be a nightmare. The validity of the lot itself may even come into question. Generally I would expect the laws governing the creation of lots to try to prevent useless lots like this.
Honestly I don’t understand how lots like this even get listed. I looked at one in my city that was a little piece of a corner between two homes. It’s far too small to build on and you probably couldn’t even fence it off legally. Literally the only thing you could do with it is try to coerce the adjacent homeowner who’s been using it to buy it from you, but that’s just evil, and who wants to be evil?
Iirc it’s 20 years in some states. Adverse possession is pretty rare in any urban setting cuz it’s often changed hands or been surveyed recently.
There’s also an easement in play here, I think, though.
Edit:… Nm
.it IS the easement 😅🤷♂️🤣
If those owners figure it out they should hire a lawyer to buy it and parcel it out b/t all of them so they can expand their fences or just to prevent someone else.
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I love the realtor’s pitch:
Situated in a nice Renton, WA neighborhood this unique parcel stretches behind six homes and is accessed through the public right of way. Imagine the things you could do? Parking of vehicles and “toys” comes to mind immediately … or storage? How could you put a piece of property like this to use for yourself? Gardening? A place to hang out? It’s right next to a big green belt so you’ve got all that privacy at your feet. Recreation? Camping? And just strictly as an investment … can you think of any Real Estate in King County Washington that gone down in value over time? “A rising tide lifts all boats”! Tax ID# 7708201190. NE 4th St to N on Jericho Ave NE. Stop just before Road Curves left. Parcel is behind the houses straight ahead.
Never understood how Americans live like this. Probably would be better in an apartment
You never understood how people could live in homes over 2000 sqft with two car garages?
It’s not that. It might be because I grew countryside but amount of garden for a house is extremely small
Oh okay there makes sense. Yeah something that isn’t talked about much is how single family zoning has evolved to require much less yard space.
Build a home on it. Live the hallway dream.
