Property value | A good piece of Maine land used to work out to a shiny set of chompers
Like most dentists Down East back in the 1950s and ‘60s, my father had to be creative when it came to payment plans for his dental work. Hse knew he could have made more in a big city but preferred practicing right where he was.
Luckily, people in need of a lot of dental work usually had the good sense to bring money or an interesting barter proposal with them to the office. Before beginning the procedure, my father and the patient would agree on a trade. Father always said the best deals are the ones where both parties come away satisfied they got a good deal.
It was well known around the area that my father would take even house lots and other real estate in trade for treatment, back in the days when you could get a nice piece of land in the country for around the price of a partial or a bridge.
There were some families in our town who were called land poor — they had inherited lots of real estate but they didn’t have the money to do anything with it. Over a period of six to eight months one year, my father made several sets of false teeth for members of one such family. When it was all over, my father figured he owned half their heirship property. How little he knew.
The next spring, when he wanted to put some of the property on the market, my father learned why so much heirship property remains unsold. The title to the land is often far from clear.
Turns out the original owner of the property left it to his “heirs and assigns,” except he neglected to dole out the land and assign specific pieces of land to each heir.
The result, of course, was that all heirs owned all the land and before any part of the land could be sold all heirs had to sign off on the deal.
That might have been possible around the time the poor man died but since his death the number of heirs went from eight or 10 to around 84 and growing. They say in young, healthy families, heirs have a tendency to do that quite easily.
When asked about the heirship situation, a local attorney who was a patient of my father’s and was also into bartering for services told my father he didn’t think he’d live long enough to straighten out the deed, and on the off-chance he did live that long, he would have accumulated enough billable hours on that one deed to pay off a good chunk of the national debt.
My wife and I had our own deed dilemma a few years back. We wanted to buy a three-acre piece of property adjoining ours and thought the whole thing would be pretty simple. But after looking over the deed, our lawyer called and said there was a clause that gave a neighbor — Charlie Russell — the right to come on the property at any time to inspect and repair a pipe that once carried water to the cistern in his basement.
When I asked the seller about it he said he didn’t think it was still in effect since the stream that provided the water had long since been diverted and the pipe had been removed.
My lawyer drew something for the neighbor to sign that would nullify the clause and straighten out the deed. Problem was, I took the paper over to Charlie’s house and he told me right up front he wasn’t signing anything. When I asked why, he said something I still remember. He said, “Why do you want what’s mine?”
I wasn’t going to argue. Whatever the clause was, it was his. If he wanted to maintain in his mind the right to come on the land to do maintenance on a pipe that was no longer there, I figured, why not?
I took the paper out of Charlie’s hand and walked back home.
We ended up buying the property and as far as I know Charlie never came around to work on or even visit the pipe that wasn’t there. When we sold the property we told the new owners about Charlie’s curious clause and they had no problem with it. As far as I know Charlie has never bothered to exercise the clause.
But I have no doubt that if Charlie is still alive he sleeps a little sounder at night knowing he never signed away what was deeded to him — the right to go on a piece of Maine property to inspect and maintain a pipe that doesn’t exist. Call me a Mainer, but I don’t think I would have signed either.
John McDonald, an author, humorist and storyteller who performs throughout New England, can be reached at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com. Read more of John’s columns at www.mainebiz.biz.
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