Do you know that your house can be legally taken by total strangers?

In Australia, there is a legal principle called ‘adverse possession’. In lay term, we call it ‘squatter’s rights’. As a house owner, if for some reason, you leave your house unoccupied, and someone else moves in your house to have exclusive and factual possession of it for 12 years, they will become legally entitled to claim the title of the house. This just happened to someone in New South Wales in 2020, where a property developer successfully claimed squatter’s rights on a Sydney house valued at $1.4m (+). 

Use it or lose it.