I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.
So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.
I am a very large snake and this is my dream home.
Seriously though, that isn’t just someone’s easement? How did it even end up as a separate lot?
In all honesty there are probably some perfectly reasonable official records that somehow got parsed incorrectly to give us this abomination.
My bet is that a developer bought up a huge chunk of land, and built these subdivisions on it. The roads, houses, and strip were all originally part of that property. That tiny strip is an easement owned by the HOA. It is not, nor will ever be, for sale. However Zillow didn’t know what to make of it, so just listed it as a land property and then applied its normal value calculations to the strip.
If you really hate someone who lives in one of those six houses, this lot affords you many opportunities for mischief.
I can’t imagine any other reason for this to exist.
Most places near me require you to give access to your neighbor to their own property, so if you had a lot like this you would still need to let them have access to their back yard via your chaos strip.
My understanding is that this only applies if there’s no other way for the neighbor to access their own property. If the property owners can access their property from any other way (for example, from the city streets), there’s no obligation for a landowner who owns the back of the property to allow them to have a second access point.
Does my backyard neighbor owe me the right to cut across his back yard to access mine? No. I have a driveway that connects to a city street.
On the chaos angle, I’d imagine that some of those homes have built backyard gates that allow them direct private access to that park. If someone were to buy up that strip they could cut that off and basically extort each homeowner for access. It’s possible that the homeowners could claim some sort of “I’ve used this land for 20 years for access to the park argument,” but that would involve individual claims, expense, and a general PITA legal mess. And depending on the locality, it may require you to prove that you’ve done improvements to the property and a whole host of other PITA things.
Best case for those homeowners is to pay a couple of thousand each to buy the lot and come to an agreement among themselves on subdivision and/or collective maintenance and access rights.
The perfect property for the zip line/archery enthusiast
Looks like someone is already built over their lot line into this space on Zillow. Good luck with the extra court battle! https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/601-Jericho-Ave-NE-Renton-WA-98059/2064096887_zpid