When the City Repairs or Demolishes Your House and Bills You

We should say plainly where our interest lies and why it does not shape this page. A demolition bill is the sort of thing a house-buying company can use to hurry somebody. But one of the three routes below survives a sale, so "sell it and walk away" is not advice we can honestly give — and two of the provisions below are protections that cost nothing to use.

It is not only demolition

The first surprise is how wide the trigger is. The statute does not talk about condemned houses. It defines an abatement activity as each instance of any of the following:

• Removing, repairing or securing insecure, unsafe, structurally defective, abandoned, deserted, or open and vacant buildings or other structures.
• Making emergency corrections of hazardous conditions.
• Abatement of any nuisance by the municipality or its agent.

Read the first one again. Securing an open and vacant building is in there. A crew screwing plywood over a broken back window on a house nobody lives in is an abatement activity, and "each instance" means the count is per visit rather than per property.

What they can charge for is defined just as carefully: costs from using the municipality’s own employees, materials or equipment; costs arising out of contracts for labour, materials or equipment; and the costs of serving notice or publishing it. We are not going to put a number on any of that. Competing pages quote demolition prices freely, and not one of those figures is traceable to a source we can read.

Three ways they collect, and only one is about the land

This is where most writing on the subject stops too early. The statute says a municipality "may collect the total cost of abatement activities by any of the methods" it then lists. Three of them.

Summarised from ORC 715.261(B). These are alternatives available to the municipality, not stages it must work through in order. The board of revision route named in the third row is the expedited procedure we cover separately in our article on abandoned-land tax foreclosure; we read those sections for that post and did not re-read them for this one.

The one-year condition on priority

On the tax-list route, the charge does not simply take its place in the queue from the day it is entered. The statute says the placement "relates back to, and is effective in priority, as of the date the costs were incurred" — with a condition attached:

So the date the work was done, and the date the paperwork was certified, are two different dates and the gap between them matters. It is a reasonable question to put to the city in writing: when were the costs incurred, and when were they certified to the auditor.

Three situations where the charge cannot be placed

Division (D) is the part that is genuinely in a property owner’s favour, and it is missing from every page we found on this subject. The municipality shall not certify, and the auditor shall not place, the costs as a charge against the land where any of these apply:

1. 1

   The land went to an electing subdivision first

2. 2

   It sold at a sheriff’s or auditor’s sale to a genuine outside buyer

3. 3

   It was forfeited to the state for delinquent taxes

And if a charge was placed anyway, the remedy is a letter rather than a lawsuit. On valid written notice to the county auditor from an owner possessing an ownership interest of record, saying the charge was placed in violation of that division, "the county auditor shall promptly remove such charge from the tax duplicate". The notice has to carry four things: the parcel number, the common address, the date the transfer to the owner was recorded, and the charge alleged to have been placed in violation.

What a trip through the land bank does

One more provision worth knowing, particularly around here. Where a parcel carrying one of these liens is transferred to a county land reutilization corporation — a county land bank — the lien is extinguished, so long as it is for costs incurred before the transfer that the corporation did not itself incur, and whether or not the lien had already attached or the costs had already been certified.

The corporation and its successors in title take the property free and clear of the lien and are immune from liability in any action to collect those costs. And where the land bank takes title before any costs are certified, the statute deems it a bona fide purchaser for value without knowledge — "regardless of whether the corporation had actual or constructive knowledge" of the costs or the lien. That is why a house that has come through a county land bank can arrive on the market clean of charges that were sitting on it beforehand.

Your options, honestly

If a building of yours is empty and deteriorating, the order below is roughly the order of least regret.

• Secure it yourself, now. Every route above starts with the city doing something you did not. Boarding, locking and keeping the grass down is cheaper than being billed for the same work, and it removes the trigger. This is first on the list for a reason.
• Ask the city what is outstanding, in writing. What work was done, on what dates, when it was certified, and under which of the three routes they are proceeding. You cannot make a decision around a number nobody has given you.
• Repair and list. If the building is salvageable, a repaired house on the open market is usually the highest gross. Ohio commissions generally run 5.5% to 6%.
• Rent it. An occupied building stops being an "open and vacant" one, which is the description several of these powers hang on — though being a landlord on a property in this condition is its own project.
• List it as-is. A narrower buyer pool and a lower price, with whatever is on the tax duplicate coming out of the proceeds at closing like any other charge collected as taxes.
• Sell direct. No commissions, no repairs, closing as fast as 7 days where the title work is clean and typically around 21, at a price below retail. It resolves what attaches to the land. It does not by itself resolve a claim under the civil-action route against you personally.

Where this leaves you

Three things to take away. The trigger is wider than demolition — securing an open and vacant building is named in the same breath. The exposure is wider than the lien, because the civil-action route follows the person who held title when the work was done rather than the property. And the protections in division (D) are real: three situations where the charge cannot be placed, plus a written notice that obliges the county auditor to remove one that was.

What we cannot tell you is what your own municipality has done or how it runs its programme. We did not read any city’s pages for this article, deliberately — a guessed municipal URL has served us an unrelated page before — so ring the building department and ask. If the building has already been declared unfit, our article on selling a condemned house covers that side of it, and the receivership article covers what happens when a court rather than the city takes charge.