Woman loses half of her house to neighbor | The Compost Bin | Forums

how is this even possible, why wasn't there someone along the chain that said, this isn't right

BREWSTER, N.Y. — A woman who lives on a hillside that straddles the New York-Connecticut line has learned that she doesn't own half her house — all because her mortgage servicer hadn't paid the property taxes.

But until Roseanne Di Guilio decided that she wanted to build a shed a couple of years ago near the property line with her neighbor, she had no idea that she had a problem.

"They told me I no longer owned my land," said Di Guilio, who had called officials in the town of Patterson, N.Y. "I was like, 'What do you mean I don't own that property? I've owned this property since 1997.' "

But Di Guilio lost her New York land in 2010 because the mortgage servicer hadn't paid annual property taxes of about $200 since 2004.

Putnam County foreclosed, and her neighbor, Alethea Jacob, bought it for $275 in a county auction.

"I'm just an average person living my life," said Di Guilio, who works for an electrical contractor in Bethel, Conn. "My neighbor is an opportunist. She was looking for something for nothing."

“I'm just an average person living my life. My neighbor is an opportunist.”
Roseanne Di Guilio, Brewster, N.Y. & New Fairfield, Conn.
Not so, said Jacob's lawyer, Robert Karlsson.

"There was a yellow sign posted on the tree announcing a real-estate sale, and she decided she wanted to snap it up," Karlsson said. "Who wouldn't want to make their property larger? She bid on the property, and to her delight, there she goes — she has a larger property."

But Jacob's 0.2 acres includes Di Guilio's living room, kitchen and sun porch. Part of her bathroom is in New York.

And while Jacob took ownership of half of the house, she let Di Guilio keep paying her homeowners' insurance. And Di Guilio paid a tree service to clean up the yard that she didn't realize Jacob owned after trees came down in an October 2011 storm.

Di Guilio also paid contractors to mow the lawn, clean the gutters and blow the leaves off what had become her neighbor's property.

"I escrowed my taxes and thought they were being paid," Di Guilio said. "But they never were."

http://www.thv11.com...../23360789/