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This can be difficult to grasp. I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed. I called the security company to transfer ownership but that
by Xenoamorphous 2y ago
This can be difficult to grasp.
I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed.
I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. The problem is, they were unreachable, and I was living on a house that I now owned, and which had cameras the previous owner could take pics from at any time.
My patience was running out so I threatened the security company with removing the cameras installed in the house I owned, but I was told that they owned them even if they were inside my house.
- hedora 2y agoAt that point, you could point out that you have no contract with them, and that they’ve abandoned their property on your place. The last time I checked, US property rights made it clear that you cannot just store stuff on other people’s land without permission, and then complain when they throw it away. They could try to argue that whatever contract the previous owner signed still applies, but for that to be the case, they would have had to amend the deed to the property, and that should have been noticed by your title agency.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoFWIW this was not in the US.
- jhugo 2y agoRegardless I would have carefully taken these down and put them in a box on the day I moved in. And then called them (or better, written to them) and given them a reasonable amount of time (maybe a couple months) to collect their property, making it clear that I would dispose of it after that time expired.
- sidewndr46 2y agoWhy? After cutting the power to them I'd tell the company if they wanted them back I can take them down and ship them back at my standard rate of $500/hr
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago> 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 2y agoNot 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.
- IanCal 2y ago> In Europe You can't just lump 27 countries with wildly differing laws together like this.
- madaxe_again 2y agoOk 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 2y ago
- cosmotic 2y agoI think the sheriff's practice of putting stuff in the street during an eviction would be a possible course of action there.
- superb_dev 2y agoDo you still have the cameras or did you remove them?
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoThey were able to contact the previous owner in a matter of days and now the contract is with me, not him.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bean-weevil 2y agoThey own the cameras. You can still take them down and give them back if requested.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoThe thing is, first of all I’m hardly a handyman, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Second, I was dealing with moving to a new place, which can be very stressful (to add to that, my girlfriend was 6 months pregnant and my dad had passed away unexpectedly less than 2 months earlier). And third, I wanted the alarm, just with me in the contract and with the access to the cameras, not the previous owner. I simply covered them. The threat was just me running out of patience.
- cyberpunk 2y agoI can’t believe this is true. How can you have so little care over the privacy of your family? They have microphones too.
- behringer 2y agotape on the microphone holes render them inoperable
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- N19PEDL2 2y agoMaybe you could just cut the wires. Surely the former tenant's contract does not oblige you to provide electricity and connectivity to those devices.
- j-bos 2y agoDude, that sounds stressful, but you seem to be agreeing to live a prisoners life and leaving your family within it. I'm am legitimately sad to hear about your situation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- theodric 2y agoSo you uninstalled them and FedExed them to the company along with a bill for the deinstallation work, right?
- cyberpunk 2y agoSorry. But I have to ask. What the actual fuck?! Why would you have cameras inside your house to begin with, let alone ones that upload to “the cloud” and let alone ones that upload to users you don’t control? I’m totally shocked by this.
- devmor 2y agoThis is a disturbingly common practice - I have seen videos on Reddit, YouTube and the like that show moments captured from cameras obviously mounted inside children’s bedrooms with a cloud service company’s logo on the feed.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. No, that's how ownership of internet accounts works. Ownership of real estate is based on completely different principles; there is no earthly reason you'd need the previous owner to be involved. Who owns what real estate is a matter of public record.
- justinclift 2y ago> they owned them Doesn't mean they need to be kept in their current location though. You're entirely within your rights to remove them and leave them in a safe place for them to retrieve at their leisure.
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoI had a similar situation with an (active) alarm and monitoring system in the last house I purchased. One of the first things I did was clip the wires, remove everything and throw it in the trash with a few other things the previous owner had left behind. You are under no obligation to store or keep active property abandoned after a sale (at least here in the US).