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Everyone’s talking about squatters. What should you do if someone holes up in your home?
In Massachusetts, property owners can’t just change the locks, a lawyer said: They'll have to work through the summary eviction process.
When Adele Andaloro entered her Queens, N.Y., home and found two people she said were squatting there, she changed the locks.
And the police arrested her, WABC reported.
The New York City ABC affiliate also reported that a man is refusing to leave a multimillion dollar home in the borough, and the homeowners are claiming that he has even tried to rent out rooms.
These stories and other anecdotes shared across social media have pumped up conversation and concern about squatting across the United States. According to Google Trends, search interest for the term “squatters” hit its highest peak last month in the two decades the company has published the data.
Legislators are responding to the uproar: New York City Mayor Eric Adams said it’s imperative to protect homeowners, and a new bill in Arizona would speed up the process in which homeowners can remove squatters from their homes, Newsweek reported. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bipartisan bill on March 27 that allows law enforcement to remove a squatter from the property if:
- The individual has unlawfully entered and remains on the property;
- The individual has been directed to leave the property by the owner but has not done so; and
- The individual is not a current or former tenant in a legal dispute.
Squatters vs. eviction
Marco Sandonato, a lawyer specializing in landlord and tenant cases, said the cases driving media attention don’t involve squatters rights, which takes 20 years for someone to establish in Massachusetts.
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The stories are about people staying in a home illegally.
A legal doctrine called “adverse possession” allows “a person to claim a property right in land owned by another,” a Trial Court Law Libraries webpage reads. In Massachusetts, though, it takes 20 years of possessing the property for someone to make the claim, according to an 1853 ruling.
“What you’re seeing in the national media about people overstaying their welcome, so to speak, in vacation homes or coming into an abandoned home and staying,” he said. “That’s not exactly what you’re talking about in terms of adverse possession.”
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Sheryl R. Furnari, a BayState Law Group attorney, said she encountered an eviction case few weeks ago in which a man occupied a property for seven years after the homeowner died and the home’s heirs were not maintaining the property.
“If he had been doing what he had been doing for 20 years,” Furnari said, “he would’ve had a claim, because he was fixing the water pipes, he painted the house, he lived in it — of course — the whole time.”
Furnari said a lot of adverse possession claims are made over a shared driveway or over the rights to an estate after the owner dies and the heirs don’t maintain the property.
So, what should you do if a tresspasser moves in?
Morjieta Derisier, another BayState Law Group attorney, said people can confuse trespassing issues and situations that require an eviction.
“If you find a stranger in your home, you call the police” Derisier said. “You tell them that they’re trespassing. But if they’ve been there a week, a month, three months — six months — then I think the idea is that some rights have been acquired, and you would have to go through the eviction process.”
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Furnari said this was the case for a woman she represented whose son died during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his friends moved into his home.
More on property disputes
Sandonato said the property owner will have to work through a summary eviction process.
He said a property owner will need to serve a notice to the person occupying the property and wait until the notice period ends. Then the property owner will have to serve the person with a summons and file it with the appropriate court, which will set up a mediation.
Lawyers can shorten the notice period, which may extend for 30 days, based on the situation, Sandonato said. If someone is trespassing, he said, you can reduce the notice period to as short as 72 hours.
Just don’t change the locks, he said. That’s illegal.
Sandonato said the whole eviction process is pretty efficient, adding that it takes a matter of months to resolve a case compared with litigation in the state’s superior courts, which can go on for years. “It’s not that it moves glacially slow …,” he said. “The problem is it doesn’t move fast enough for people who are not, say, receiving rent or people who are like: ‘Hey, listen. That’s my property. I want it back.’”
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The cases involving homeowners and squatters aren’t as frequent as landlords encountering holdover tenants in rental properties, he said.
“I’ve seen people come into a property that don’t live there,” he said, “They’ve literally wandered into a property, and we’ve given them … trespass notices and then taken them to court. But yeah, it doesn’t happen a whole hell of a lot.”
If it does, Sandonato said, “and I’m not being snarky, but certainly hire a lawyer. Because the eviction process in Massachusetts is daunting.”
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