[MassHistPres] Hardship and ownership transfer

[Jonathan Feist]

It strikes me that getting a property for $1 implies taking on the
responsibility to improve it.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

--Jonathan



on 3/20/08 9:07 PM, Ralph Slate at slater at alum.rpi.edu wrote:

> Does anyone have any specific experience with someone who transfers
> property to another owner to avoid having to fix it?
> 
> In Springfield, a structure had a substantial fire. The owner received
> an insurance settlement of $760,000. She wanted to tear the structure
> down instead of repairing it (she said it was beyond repair, we were in
> the process of evaluating that).
> 
> She then sold the property to someone else for $1, none of the $760,000
> accompanied the sale. The new owner now owns a property with probably at
> least $500,000 of damage, potentially no assets to repair it.
> 
> With the original owner, we could have pointed to the insurance money
> and said "there's no hardship because you have enough to fix the
> property". With the new owner, I'm not so sure we could do that since
> there are no assets to look at.
> 
> Surely something like this has been tried before. Anyone know of any
> similar cases?
> 
> Ralph
> 
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