We have lived in house for thirty years,my mates mom owned house, she has since passed,and left the house to her five children. The other four siblings want to sell, we of course, live here, do not want to sell. We pay the house/property taxes. Do we have any recourse? We do not want to move. We live in the state of Florida. Thank you for any help.

There are required times for perfecting adverse possession with and without "color of title" (some sort of paper forming a basis for your claim). When you are going with the "without color of title" route, you would have to follow the provisions relating to giving notice of payment of taxes exactly and for at least for the number of years specified.

But if one of you inherited the house in common with four siblings, I doubt that AP will work. The reason is that occupancy of the house was not under claim that he or she occupied it as though he or she owned it exclusively. What your mate needs to do is to file for partition, to get the court to order that the house be sold and the proceeds distributed among the five siblings.

Squatters rights don't exist. The fact that you occupy the home does not give you any greater rights than the other owners.

I don't think YOU want to file for partition, but his siblings could file so they can sell their shares or force him to sell. One point here. If you have been paying the property taxes then they owe you their share. So lets say, the house is valued at $100,000. So each sibling wants $20K. But lets say for the last 10 years you have paid the property taxes of $1K per year. That means that each sibling owes him $2000. So you could reduce the price you have to pay each sibling by that amount.

But if they want to sell and you can't buy them out you are stuck. They can file suit to force the sale.

Your only recourse is to buy out his siblings. If they want to sell then you buy them out.

There are no such thing as "squatters rights" that is a myth.

Next your MATE is not a squatter, they are part owner of the house, Has the house went though probate, and is the MATE now on the deed, or is it still in probate.

The choices are have the other owners agree to allow the Mate to live there and pay rent value to the other owners. Allow the MATE to buy out the other owners. But if all of the other owners want to see, they will be able to force the sale in court. They can not evict him, but they can force the sale.

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Originally Posted by Fr_Chuck

There are no such thing as "squatters rights" that is a myth. ...

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Actually, it's a matter of semantics. What lawyers call "adverse possession", laymen often call "squatters' rights". Means the same thing, basically.

The idea of a sqjuatters right comes from the 1800's basically where you could go and build a house on land and claim it as yours, since the land was not owned by someone, ( if you don't count for the indians)

So having those types of rights have long ago passed, it does have allowance to file for ownership under very limited reasons under adverse possession but it is not really a squatter