Jess Battison
Imagine going back to your place only to find out someone else has built their own home there.
Sounds like a nightmare, right? Well, it’s real life for some, like the bloke who found a £1.2 million house on the land he bought in the 90s, or the reverend who got to his house to find a family were living in it.
And one woman was left stunned after finding a $500,000 (£395,000) home built on the land she had bought just six years earlier.
Back in 2018, Annaleine ‘Anne’ Reynolds bought a one-acre plot in Hawaiian Paradise Park at a county tax auction for around $22,500 (£17,800).
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At the time, she reckoned it was a great deal and waited in California during the pandemic before using it.
Anne planned to host her meditative healing women’s retreats on the land in Hawaii. But then she got a call from a real estate broker of the major problem.
The land she’d paid for had been bulldozed over with a brand new, half-a-million-dollar house built in its place.
She explained to Hawaii News Now: “He told me, 'I just sold the house, and it happens to be on your property. So we need to resolve this.' And I was like, what? Are you kidding me?”
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It’s reported that she’d been paying the property taxes from the plot and yet, the developer is said to be suing Anne along with the construction company.
Plus, it’s said its suing the architect, the prior property owner’s family and the county which approved the permits.
Reports suggest that local developer Keaau Development Partnership was said to have hired PJ's Construction to build a dozen homes on the properties the developer bought in the subdivision.
And, potentially by mistake, they built one of the homes on Anne’s lot.
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She’s hired Honolulu attorney James DiPasquale to help her fight the lawsuit.
“There's a lot of fingers being pointed between the developer and the contractor and some subs,” he explained.
"It would set a dangerous precedent, if you could go on to someone else's land, build anything you want, and then sue that individual for the value of it."
And Peter Olson, an attorney representing the developer, argued that most of the lots in jungle-like Hawaiian Paradise Park are identical.
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“My client believes she’s trying to exploit PJ Construction’s mistake in order to get money from my client and the other parties,” Olson told AP.