[Emma Murphy]

We have a sale of land coming up next month and we have two properties that we are seeking some advice on, hoping someone else has encountered these:

Property 1: Deceased estate, with a house, and potentially with a house full of contents, it is rumoured that the house is as it was when the lady died. What do we do with the contents, or do we do nothing?

Property 2: Essentially vacant land, which has a caravan, old car etc on it, which isn’t owned by the property holder. No one is living in the caravan, we are trying to make contact with the owner of the goods to have them removed. If they aren’t removed, how do we deal with this on settlement or the sale?

[Ian Clayton]

Hi Emma,

We had a couple of properties similar to your property 2 in our sales over the last few years. In our cases, the old owners or relatives were unlikely to surface.

We put a special condition in the contract to make it clear that the purchaser was only buying the land/fixed improvements, and not any other possessions that may be located there. We also had the auctioneer make a similar statement on auction day. No other action was taken, essentially leaving it the old & new owner to sort out if an issue arose.

Cheers
Ian

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