[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

> given them a reasonable amount of time (maybe a couple months) to collect their property

Why waste your own time with this? If it's your house, you own everything inside. I would put all the cameras in the trash and forget about it.

[madaxe_again]

Not so. My mother bought a house in France in 1988. The previous owners had a mountain of stuff in the barn that they would come collect “soon”.

25 years passed. My mother started variously selling and disposing of their slowly rotting crap that they evidently were never going to collect, as she wanted to fix the structural issues with the barn, and their stuff was in the way, as it literally filled the entire ground floor.

And then, one day, 30 years later, their children showed up, wanting to collect their inheritance.

They sued. They won. She had to fork over about €100k.

So no, just because you own the house, you don’t own everything in it.

In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them. Sometimes they’ll even take things like doors, staircases, floors, you name it.

[skinkestek]

> In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them.

This is the first time I hwar of this.

At least in Norway the rule is that everything that is built in stays.

So table, chairs, TV, washing machine, dryer etc goes, but built in appliances and built in place furniture stays.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, from what I understand this is not the norm in the Nordic states, but it is elsewhere.

[spockz]

It’s the same in the Netherlands with the very odd exception for floors. Solid wooden floors are included but if it “laminaat” or anything not glued/nailed, it has to be explicitly mentioned in the sale contract. Just like with window shades etc.

[IanCal]

> In Europe

You can't just lump 27 countries with wildly differing laws together like this.

[madaxe_again]

Ok sure - Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, this happens. Can’t speak for elsewhere.

You have to ensure the contract of sale specifically includes things like wiring, the boiler, the radiators, flooring, light fittings and switches, because if they aren’t explicitly included, they aren’t included. There are some very odd definitions of chattels vs fixtures out there - in France, it has to be nailed to the structure to count as a fixture. If it’s screwed, glued, or otherwise not nailed down, it’s a chattel.

[gberger]

27 is just the EU. The whole of Europe is more like 50, which is even wilder!

[tomrod]

That's a super dumb outcome for your poor mother.

Abandoned property is just that.

[dylan604]

Your mom should have provided them a bill for storage fees the equaled or surpassed €100k.

[madaxe_again]

In France it’s only counted as abandoned if it is more than 30 years. These guys rocked up at something like 29 years and 9 months, and because there had been a verbal agreement that they would one day collect, and my mother allowed it, she was deemed to have stolen property she was entrusted to store.

She was actually lucky to avoid criminal charges.

[tomrod]

I maintain that this is a dumb (i.e. completely unreasonable) outcome for your mother.

Abandonment should be measured at the takeover of property in lieu of agreement, and a reasonable time frame for pickup agreement is on the order of days, not years.

[elzbardico]

I really think she should counter-sue for storage fees and damages.

[77pt77]

This is ridiculous.

At that point just lie and say that it never happened.

Or that the preperty was just some dishes or something.

[vkazanov]

Both times my, ehm, good friend bought a house in uk the docs included a very thorough list of things that had to stay, as well as things that HAD to go.

Does England count as Europe?

[jhugo]

Geographically, England is part of Europe, but regardless of the EU membership thing, UK domestic laws have always been very different from those in continental Europe due to very different legal histories. They aligned on the kinds of things that the EU regulates, but when it comes to something like property abandonment I’d expect them to be wildly different.

[madaxe_again]

Not in this case, no - at least, it’s not the norm in the U.K., whereas it absolutely is in a lot of mainland Europe.

[TomK32]

Quite shockingly Old Blighty hasn't been French for quite some time.

[77pt77]

> In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them. Sometimes they’ll even take things like doors, staircases, floors, you name it.

LOL!

No. This is not common at all.

I've seen it from disgruntled former renters, but that's it.

It's also illegal.

[Aeolun]

That doesn’t make any sense. What would the value of that stuff be if she’d just moved it out of the barn and left it to rot there?

[IncreasePosts]

And how is there any record of what was in the barn, or how much it was worth, or either it has been stolen or collected by the owner any time in the past 30 years. I don't want to call OP a liar, but a lot of times when I hear outrageous stories like this the details are very different than what was provided.

[madaxe_again]

Among other stuff, there was a bunch of Italian modernist art from the 50s-70s. It was literally decomposing in there, and my mother sold a few pieces at auction at about the 25 year point, which was then used as a reference point for the value of the collection as a whole, and as evidence that she was acting maliciously, that she knew the value of what was in there.

The owner died in the early 90s - the folks who rocked up were the grandchildren of her ex-husband.

As for people who have said “oh she should have charged for the storage” - that would have been nice, but that wasn’t the agreement, and French law treats a verbal agreement as a contract, and also places the onus in this type of situation on the person holding the goods to make extensive efforts to contact the owner and/or their heirs.

[Flozzin]

I'm really shocked that 'soon' can be considered 30 years. So you agree to store someones stuff for a short time, and then you are locked in for 30+ years? I thought america had crazy lawsuits...

[madaxe_again]

Oh, French property and tort law is nuts, and largely founded in egalitarian ideals from the revolutions. Quite the case of “be careful what you wish for”.

There was recently a case in the press where person sold “old junk” to an antique dealer. Antique dealer sells it at auction for fortune. Antique dealer is then forced to hand over full sum to person who sold old junk/priceless antique.

Squatters rights are incredible. A friend had their house occupied one winter while they were away, 16 years ago. The squatters had a baby. They are only legally allowed to remove them this year, when the child turns 18.

The napoleonic code. This is why France is full of abandoned properties, stuck in probate for all eternity, as finding and getting hundreds of heirs to unanimously agree on a sale or whatever is… hard.

[77pt77]

> but that wasn’t the agreement, and French law treats a verbal agreement as a contract

True, but the thing with verbal agreements is that it's very difficult to prove what was agreed upon.

Your mother should have just lied.

[madaxe_again]

Hindsight is a bitch. In short, she had no idea what kind of rake she was stepping on, and so saw no need to dissemble. She matter-of-factly told them they were welcome to take what remained, which was about 1/5 of what had been there — and then she got the letter from their lawyers, by which time it was too late.

[maccard]

Doing that is illegal in many places. Here’s a decent summary in the Uk [0]

[0] https://jebaring.co.uk/involuntary-bailee-what-to-do/

[behringer]

It's also just not very nice. It is ok to be nice to people. Do unto others and all that.

And before I get called naive, courts do look very favorably upon defendants that are nice.

[j-bos]

It's not nice to stick eyeballs under people's vestiments. It's not nice to put hands on a stranger. Bad faith actions can be responded to without malice but there is no need to be nice. Non consentual cameras in a private dwelling are never good faith.

[behringer]

why would anyone leave such a system running?

[bigallen]

Maybe it’s a prepaid annual membership and the owner forgot/died/didn’t cancel?

[maccard]

I completely agree. Involuntary bailee in the UK is one of the nastier parts of the law (IMO) it penalises you for being a decent person and gives the power to the asshole. It’s ripe for abuse.