Going, Going, Gone: New Tactic by Real Estate Investors Forcing Some New Yorkers from Their Homes (NY1)
NY1, March 19, 2019
Going, Going, Gone: New Tactic by Real Estate Investors Forcing Some New Yorkers from Their Homes
“When a property has multiple owners, generally any owner can force its sale by filing what’s known as a ‘partition action’ in court. The concept dates to English common law. But NY1 discovered, a growing number of investors are using partition actions to reap windfalls today. ‘There is nothing to stop this sort of behavior,’ says Scott Kohanowski, director of the Homeowner Stability Project with the City Bar Justice Center. Kohanowski says Lloyd’s case fits a pattern he has been seeing in the city recently: Investors swooping in, forcing the sale of houses that, through inheritances, are owned by many members of one family. ‘Investors will acquire these individual interests from these heirs one by one or as a group,’ he says, ‘and then they will approach the holdout.'”
