 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Back
|
A house divided, land speculator seeks his profit
By JEFF TESTERMAN, Times Staff Writer TAMPA -- Land speculator Don Connolly showed up on Luella Williams' doorstep in February and announced that he had bought half her Tampa Heights house. "I thought he was crazy," said Williams, 43, a medical billing specialist. "I've had this house for nine years."
Williams' living room, dining room, kitchen, utility area and front porch were on Connolly's land. The three bedrooms, two baths and flower garden were on her half. For Williams, the news soon got worse. Connolly sued her, asking a judge to order the home, valued at about $63,000, be sold. He said the proceeds of the sale should be split between him and Williams and any party with a mortgage on the property. Williams went to officials at the city of Tampa, which had helped her buy the home. Her conclusion: "I'm sure we're going to have to take care of this in court." City officials wrote Connolly and even sought an asking price, but Connolly never replied. "To gain from someone's misfortune like this, that's just not right," City Attorney Jim Palermo said. "But is it illegal? I'm not equipped to say." Connolly is the Valrico entrepreneur who has angered homeowners with his business strategy of buying tax deeds and using intimidation to force adjacent landowners to pay top dollar for his new properties. His first deal to come to light was in North Pinellas, where he bought the tax deed for a small lake and put up a fence on the shoreline to try to get $30,000 apiece from owners whose homes suddenly weren't waterfront. Luella Williams bought her house in 1993 through a city program for low-income people. The deal was arranged by the city and one of its nonprofit housing partners, the Tampa United Methodist Centers. A survey Williams received at the time of purchase shows she was supposed to have bought all of lot No. 1 on her block on N Ola Avenue. But years earlier, the lot had been subdivided into two parcels. Apparently unwittingly, the Methodist Centers conveyed only the south half of the lot to Williams at closing. Aggravating the error was that the concrete home on the lot had been moved there from the route of the Veterans Expressway, and plopped down almost precisely in the middle of lot No. 1. The boundary between the north parcel and south parcel invisibly divided the house in half. For years, no one noticed. Allstate Title Co, which performed the title search on the land, did not catch the error. (The company has since gone out of business, city officials said.) Williams filed for her homestead exemption and began paying her taxes. The Hillsborough property appraiser saw that Williams owned only half of the lot, but assumed the house was on that half. The appraiser placed 100 percent of the house's assessment on the southern parcel owned by Williams. Meanwhile, tax bills for the northern parcel kept going to the Methodist Centers. For some reason, the nonprofit agency ignored them. The unpaid tax bills piled up from 1994 to 2001. Then along came Connolly. On Feb. 18, Connolly, as trustee for his Connolly Family Land Trust, handed the clerk of the court a certified check for $2,400 for the back taxes and interest owed on the parcel. Then, he filed his lawsuit. The suit seeks to assert his title to the land, claiming that mortgage liens from the city of Tampa and a commercial bank to Williams are no longer valid. Connolly also asked that the house be partitioned, or divided in half. If it could not be partitioned to the satisfaction of all, he said, then the court should order the sale of the property, "equally dividing the proceeds between the plaintiff and defendants." The city, which made a $20,000 loan with payment deferred until the home is sold, responds in court papers that Connolly's tax deed does not invalidate their lien on Williams' property. State law says a municipal government's lien survives the purchase of a tax deed. The case remains pending in Hillsborough Circuit Court. Neither Connolly nor the Tampa United Methodist Centers returned calls from the St. Petersburg Times. Will Shepherd, general counsel for the Hillsborough Property Appraiser's Office, said the law might not allow Connolly to claim half of Williams' house, even if he does have a deed to the dirt beneath it. "It might be looked at like a condominium: You own your unit, even though you don't own the land under the condominium," Shepherd said. "In my opinion, he's not entitled to any part of the house. "Of course, my opinions don't always agree with those handed down by the court." -- Jeff Testerman can be reached at (813) 226-3422, or at testerman@sptimes.com. Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
Headlines From the Times local news desks |
But Connolly was telling the truth. Capitalizing on an oversight made years ago, he had bought for $2,400 the tax deed to the north half of Williams' lot at 2510 N Ola Ave. The property line almost perfectly bisected Williams' 1,528-square-foot home.
