Neighbor Wars·
MISSING LOT, HALF A BARN
After paying off three vacant lots, a Michigan buyer discovers Lot 3 holds half a pole barn, forcing a survey and a potential quitclaim to untangle a tangled sale.
Fix it with a quitclaim deed or not?
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For 3.5 years, a Michigan land buyer thought they had quietly paid off three vacant commercial lots, until the paperwork revealed they may have bought part of a pole barn.
The deal had looked simple enough at the start. The poster purchased 0.85 acres made up of three adjoining lots through the seller's real estate agent, but the payment itself was handled by land contract directly with the seller. The lots sat vacant, the listing photos showed empty ground, and everything seemed to line up with the acreage and highway frontage described in the ad.
Then the final payments were made, the land contract was fulfilled, and the poster went back through the documents.
That's when the problem surfaced: what both sides believed had changed hands was not the same thing.
According to the poster, "what the seller thought he was selling and I thought I was buying was actually only lots 1 and 2." The third lot had apparently been swept up in the paperwork by mistake. And lot 3 was not empty. It was an adjoining parcel the seller still owned, and it included half of his pole barn.
The poster checked plat maps to confirm it, then talked to the seller. He agreed with the assessment. He did not intend to sell lot 3, and he said he had no idea how the error happened or why nobody caught it.
Apparently, not even the city noticed.
The poster said the local tax records had been treating all three lots as if they were part of the purchase, with property taxes assessed on lot 3 as vacant land even though it was not vacant at all. In other words, everyone seemed to have missed the same detail for years: a chunk of a working pole barn had ended up in the middle of a land sale that neither side fully understood.
Now the poster wants to clean it up. Before making any changes, they plan to get a survey. After that, they asked the question that sits at the center of the mess: "Is a quitclaim deed the most straight-forward way to resolve this," possibly paired with reimbursing the seller for the taxes paid on lot 3 over the past three or four years.
They also made clear they do not want any extra money for it. "I don't want any extra money for it as it was land I didn't think I was buying anyways," they wrote.
In an edit, the poster thanked people for the responses and said they now had a better chance of understanding whatever the professionals tell them next.