Mesa County is one of the top five counties in Colorado with the most mobile homes with more than 4,400. When you purchase a mobile home be sure to get the title from the previous owner so you don’t end up losing your home to delinquent taxes you were never notified about and having to pay thousands of dollars to get your home back!
Treasurer Helps Mobile Home Owners With New State Law
By Charles Ashby
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
Published: October 13, 2019
Mesa County Treasurer Sheila Reiner is trying to protect low-income mobile home owners from losing their homes because of simple misunderstandings.
That’s why Reiner is taking advantage of a relatively new state law that would remove mobile homes, those that still are mobile, from being purchased by investors and taken out from under their owners because of delinquent taxes on their property.
Part of the problem is that the owners of these homes, which cost far less than a regular home, don’t always get titles to them. Consequently, they don’t always see the tax bills when they arrive, in part, because they are addressed to someone else.
“We often hear from occupants of mobile homes that they bought but never got the title,” Reiner said. “We experienced this in the county clerk’s office. Bonding for titles through the clerk and recorder’s office is an expensive and lengthy process. Straightening out ownership at the treasurer’s can buy it back, sometimes for thousands of dollars more than they purchased the mobile homes for in the first place. Prior to 2017, county treasurers were required to treat delinquent taxes on mobile homes, ones that aren’t permanently affixed to the ground, the same as for any permanent office is less expensive and a more straightforward process.”
Reiner, who until last year was the county’s clerk and recorder, said that while it isn’t rampant in the county, oftentimes new mobile home owners aren’t going through the full process to let the county know they purchased them.
That happens, in part, because those owners are waiting for the person they purchased the home from to send them a certificate of title, which doesn’t always happen.
Unless that occurs, and county officials are notified of the new owners, tax bills are sent to the only owners they are aware of, and not necessarily the new owner. When people purchase regular homes, all of that normally is taken care of by title companies, a service that most mobile home buyers don’t generally use, Reiner said.
If those taxes aren’t paid off within a year, the mobile homes can be included in delinquent tax sales much like foreclosed homes. There, mobile home investors routinely come in and essentially buy the homes by paying off the taxes and any associated fees.
Those investors then contact the real owners to say they no longer own the home, but structure.
That was the year the Colorado Legislature approved a new law — one that won unanimous support from both sides of the political aisle — that allows treasurers to treat mobile homes differently, including preventing them from being sold to investors.
There are more than 4,400 mobile homes in Mesa County, making it one of the top five counties in the state with them. Currently, about 5% of Mesa County’s mobile homes have delinquent taxes. The delinquency rate for non-mobile home residences is about 1%, she said.
As of this week, Reiner is taking them out of the next tax lien sale, something she said mobile home investors are already griping about.
In 2016, 78 mobile homes were sold in a lien sale, with a single bidder buying 52 of them. That has dropped off in recent years, with 56 sold in 2017 and 27 in 2018, with one bidder buying 14 of them in 2017 and 27 in 2018.
Under the new rules, Reiner and her office will have more time to work with mobile home owners whose taxes are delinquent and straighten out any issues.
“I want to clean this up and get the tax notices to the correct owners in the end,” Reiner said. “This should decrease our delinquent rate. Our goal is to get the right name on the property tax bill and help ensure that the rightful owners do not lose possession.”
Weld County Treasurer John Lefebvre said many unsuspecting mobile home owners unwittingly lose their homes or are forced to spend thousands of dollars to buy them back, all for failing to pay a few hundred dollars in unpaid taxes.
Lefebvre, whose county has exempted mobile homes from this process, said it normally impacts low-income people. He said the average tax lien is only about $120. Boulder and Adams counties are the other two counties to do so.
“These people are losing their homes for the lack of paying $120, which they could pay to us in two half payments,” he said. “We don’t want people losing their homes. We’re dealing with older homes here. We’ve been transferring 40 to 50 of these a year, where we used to have about 500 mobile homes that were going to sale.”
Lefebvre said the problem primarily impacts older, single- wide mobile homes, which don’t cost very much, usually $5,000 to $20,000.
Jessie Cahoon, community manager for several area mobile home parks, including Paradise Valley Park on 25½ Road, said he doesn’t see very many people losing their homes because of this, but has seen it happen.
He said it usually occurs because some new mobile home buyers don’t realize they have to pay taxes on their properties. That tax is more like a personal property tax such as those assessed on motor vehicles, rather than a regular property tax that homeowners pay.
Unlike home deeds that are filed with county clerks’ offices, mobile homes are registered through the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles.
Cahoon said some of those new mobile home owners aren’t taking the time to make sure the title to their property are in their names.
“What happens is, somebody will buy a house from somebody else, and then they don’t put the title into their name,” Cahoon said. “When the taxes roll around, the previous owner can go and pay the taxes, and request a duplicate title. Then they have the title back.”
