FYI - Make sure you have permission to use your venue before you send invitations

banana468 · April 2021

DH sent me this

https://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/wedding-bride-groom-crashers-77215649?cid=clicksource_4380645_3_heads_hero_live_headlines_hed

SOUTHWEST RANCHES, Fla. -- Courtney Wilson and Shenita Jones invited family and friends to their “dream home and estate” for their weekend wedding celebration: the ceremony Saturday, brunch on Sunday.

There was just one problem: The couple didn't own the 16,300-square-foot (1,500-square-meter) mansion and didn't have permission to use it.

The suburban Fort Lauderdale estate had everything: a bowling alley, swimming pool with a waterfall, hot tub, tennis courts, a gazebo and an 800-foot (240-meter) bar. Wilson said it was God's plan that the couple marry there.

But despite what the invitation inferred, the actual owner, Nathan Finkel, never gave them permission to hold the festivities there. He was stunned when Wilson showed up Saturday morning to set up and he called police, according to the South Florida SunSentinel.

“I have people trespassing on my property,” Finkel told a 911 dispatcher. “And they keep harassing me, calling me. They say they’re having a wedding here and it’s God’s message. I don’t know what’s going on. All I want is (for) it to stop. And they’re sitting at my property right at the front gate right now.”

Two officers told Wilson he would have to leave. He did and no charges were filed.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Wilson told the paper.

Finkel, whose late father was an early IHOP restaurant franchisee, has been trying to sell the property for two years, now listing it for just over $5 million.

Wilson, posing as a potential buyer, toured the estate several months ago, said Keith Poliakoff, attorney for Southwest Ranches, the upscale suburb where Finkel resides.

“A few months later, this guy asked Nathan if he could use Nathan’s backyard for his wedding,” Poliakoff said. “Nathan said no.”

But that didn't stop the couple from sending out elaborate invitations, detailing their love story: reconnecting 30 years after high school and how he proposed over pizza on Christmas Eve. The Saturday afternoon ceremony would be followed by a red carpet cocktail hour and a reception lasting past midnight. Sunday brunch would be from noon to 4.

“The guy figured it was a vacant house and didn’t realize Nathan lived on the property in a different home,” Poliakoff said. “This guy had no idea he lived there. You know the shock that must have been on his face when he showed up at the gate and the owner was home?”

Broward County records show a marriage license has been issued to the couple last week, but they had not registered as married by Wednesday.

charlotte989875 · April 2021

Pretty bold to think you can just show up and throw a wedding hoping the owner won’t notice.

geebee908 · April 2021

Gated house. Who did they think was going to let them in in the first place? Did he somehow get the key code while he was touring the place with the realtor? So many questions.

VarunaTT · April 2021

This is all I can think of:

Mission From God GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

banana468 · April 2021

VarunaTT said:

This is all I can think of:

Fantastic.

About 20 years ago I was a summer intern and an accounting clerk started planning her wedding.

Because God told her to.

She was not in a relationship at the time.

MyNameIsNot · April 2021

Well this is the most Florida man thing I've read all day.

This reminds me of a scam around here a few years ago. During the housing collapse in like 2012, there were a lot of houses in foreclosure. More often than not, by the time the foreclosure process was finished, the prior owner had moved out. But there was so much property on the market that banks couldn't sell them very fast, leaving houses sitting empty for months at a time. Scammers figured out how to check the notices and find the vacant properties. They'd break in, change the locks and list the property for rent on craigslist. Some unsuspecting tenant would pay rent and deposit, move in and quickly find out that the "landlord" was fake and the bank is evicting them.

short+sassy · April 2021

MyNameIsNot said:

Well this is the most Florida man thing I've read all day.

This reminds me of a scam around here a few years ago. During the housing collapse in like 2012, there were a lot of houses in foreclosure. More often than not, by the time the foreclosure process was finished, the prior owner had moved out. But there was so much property on the market that banks couldn't sell them very fast, leaving houses sitting empty for months at a time. Scammers figured out how to check the notices and find the vacant properties. They'd break in, change the locks and list the property for rent on craigslist. Some unsuspecting tenant would pay rent and deposit, move in and quickly find out that the "landlord" was fake and the bank is evicting them.

Things like this still happen all the time, all over the country! Same thing with rental vacancies. On my REI forum, a lot of rental owners will put a watermark with their phone number on the pictures they post for their ad.

One of the really f**ked up things in this country is how hard it can be to get squatters out of your house. I don't mean non-paying tenants or tenants who stay past their lease. I mean criminals who break into a vacant house and quickly set up at least one utility in their name to prove residency. The police usually don't want to get involved in what could potentially be a landlord/tenant dispute, so they tell the owner to take it to eviction court.

We had a local story like that on a vacant house that was for sale. The owner lived OOS, but one of his neighbors called him one day to tell him people were living there, because the neighbor knew the owner was going to rent it out and was pretty sure it hadn't been sold. To make the story even weirder, once the police and courts were involved, the squatters claimed they could legally take the property because they were part of an Indian tribe (forget the name) and this neighborhood was once part of that tribe's lands. Not that it matters, but no part of that was true anyway. It took the owner about two months to have them legally removed, which also involved him having to take two unnecessary trips back to NOLA.

Sometimes it happens to soldiers who have been deployed and out of the country for at least a few months. Can you imagine you just finally came back home from a 6-month tour, only to find randos living in your house? Extra despicable.

The craziest story I read on my REI forum on this topic was a squatter living in a shed on vacant land. That poster was awesome because he kept us updated on what was happening for this two-year ordeal. Yes, TWO YEARS to get this guy out of a shed. Not a nice shed. Something the guy had built himself with scrap wood. No running water at all. The guy's parents lived in the house next door and would sometimes run an extension cord for him. But they had kicked him out long ago and wouldn't let him build his shed in their yard, smh. It actually might have been even longer, but the guy was thrown in jail and missed the 20th-something court hearing about the matter. Most of the court hearings had been the judge ordering the guy had to move out of the shed, but would give him X amount more time to do it. Then the guy would file an appeal to get more time. This was CA. Of course it was, lol.

So the owner finally won the case and with no more extensions granted. When they were finally able to demolish the shed, he updated us with what they found. Few belongings and you don't even want to know most of them. And one big, fat book. The kind of very technical book you'd find in a law library....all about about CA property laws!

kerbohl · April 2021

@short+sassy Wow, of course he had a book about CA property laws! That's a crazy story!

CharmedPam · April 2021

This is how I thought this was going, becuase I had an ideea to do this if I ever remarried. Rent a vbro mansion (or hugr house like mansion) and have a (very small) wedding there. But when I started to really look into that, they do say “no events” in the policy.

short+sassy · April 2021

CharmedPam said:

This is how I thought this was going, becuase I had an ideea to do this if I ever remarried. Rent a vbro mansion (or hugr house like mansion) and have a (very small) wedding there. But when I started to really look into that, they do say “no events” in the policy.

The tenant who rents the other side of my personal duplex, primarily runs an AirBnB out of it. Which is fine with me and part of our agreement from the get-go. He definitely has verbiage like that on his ad. Plus, per the short-term-rental (STR) regulations in our city, he can't have more then 4 guests staying there. Though I suppose there can be more then that if they are visitors.

In April of last year, during the worst part of the pandemic with a city-wide Stay At Home order in place, he had an AirBnB'er rent it for the weekend. Not a wedding, but that guy threw a RAGER PARTY. Our street was lined with cars. Someone parked in front of my neighbor's driveway. I'm guessing there were 30-40 people packed into a 2-bed/1ba house that's less than 900 sq. ft. TBH, I regret not trying to stop what was going on sooner, but I try not to make waves. Longer story short, I called out to someone who came onto the shared front porch if they could please turn the music way, way down. They did a little bit but just all of it was too much, so I called the police. Don't know why it took the police 90 minutes to get there with nothing going on in the city, but it wasn't until then (3:30AM) that the party ended. I let my main tenant know what had happened the next day. Not because I was mad at him, but as a warning that he was probably in for a disaster. He contacted the guy and told him to get out because he had violated the rules. The guy left, but wasn't entitled to any of his money back because the agreement breech was his.

My tenant apologized profusely and told me to contact him right away, no matter how late it is, if anything like that happens again. Unfortunately it did, about a month later. Similar story, though a smaller party (15-20 people). We gave a similar "one warning" to knock it off and be quieter, because this isn't a party house. They did for 15-20 minutes, and then turned the music right back up. When my H knocked on the door to ask them to be quieter, he also saw someone smoking, which isn't allowed by ME or my tenant. We didn't call the police this time, I contacted my tenant. He called her immediately and told her to get out. He would be there in about one hour and they better be gone when he gets there, lol. They were. Caused $2K in damage. Mainly cigarette burns to his living room throw rug and sofa.

He's been renting it as an AirBnB for two years and those are the only two times someone has ever thrown a party. Moral of the story? Bad things happen to STRs when the bars in New Orleans are closed due to COVID!

ILoveBeachMusic · April 2021

There is some group that goes around squatting in vacant houses - changing locks just like @short+sassy said. It happened to a neighbor of a friend. It took years to get it straightened out in court. My friend almost had to go testify. It was crazy scary because the group (some kind of religious group) is known for violence. They are all over the country. It isn't just foreclosures either. It has happened to houses where people live at another residence for months at a time. Scary stuff.

kvruns · April 2021

@short+sassy so your tenant that rents them out lives nearby? I thought he was out of state for some reason. Or was his "be there in an hour" just a threat?

I went down a rabbit hole on an REI forum (I think I got there from a link in a random article) about a CA situation where the guy had someone in his house for years who kept pulling every trick in the book (divorce/dispute, bankruptcy, etc) to keep prolonging staying in the house this guy had bought. Even when they finally got the sheriff to evict him the house was still full of stuff, apparently they hadn't thought they'd finally have to leave so they never packed up

kvruns · April 2021

re: the fake rental scam, the husband of a girl I grew up down the street from did that. I'm pretty sure they're very shady people to begin with but I saw it in the paper years ago that he was running this scam. So sad. I think he went to prison for a very short time but that's it

short+sassy · April 2021

kvruns said:

@short+sassy so your tenant that rents them out lives nearby? I thought he was out of state for some reason. Or was his "be there in an hour" just a threat?

I went down a rabbit hole on an REI forum (I think I got there from a link in a random article) about a CA situation where the guy had someone in his house for years who kept pulling every trick in the book (divorce/dispute, bankruptcy, etc) to keep prolonging staying in the house this guy had bought. Even when they finally got the sheriff to evict him the house was still full of stuff, apparently they hadn't thought they'd finally have to leave so they never packed up

He doesn't live out of state, he lives about 90 minutes away. So "one hour" might have been a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one. He did come to the house in the middle of the night to make sure they'd left! Though I didn't find out about all of that until the next day.

He's used to all that driving, though. His law practice often brings him to NOLA. He also likes hanging out in the city. Before the pandemic, he was also attending night classes in NOLA twice a week to get a masters in Urban Planning and usually stayed at his next door unit on those nights.

He also rents his personal home out on AirBnB, so sometimes he'll stay next door if his own home is rented out but that unit isn't. The town he lives in is more Cajun country, with an emphasis on "country", lol. More an outdoorsy type of place where people would go to fish in the bayous and get away from it all. But that's also what got him interested in finding a house he could AirBnB in NOLA. He would often get questions like "How far is this house from Bourbon St?" Which was "Oh! No, no, no! I am not near New Orleans, it's over an hour away."

It's awful what people can get away with in some states! Tenants should certainly have rights because there are terrible landlords out there also, but it shouldn't go SO FAR in the other direction that someone's property gets held hostage for such lengthy periods of time. Though that isn't how it works in most areas. Orleans parish has lost their mind during the pandemic but, normally, it's pretty fast and easy to evict someone on a black and white issue like they haven't paid the rent.

In Louisiana, that story would have played out with the judge's attitude more like this after only 1-2 months of missed rent, "So you haven't paid the rent because you filed for divorce and then a bankruptcy? Then why are you still living there? You have until noon tomorrow to vacate the property."

MyNameIsNot · April 2021

ILoveBeachMusic said:

There is some group that goes around squatting in vacant houses - changing locks just like @short+sassy said. It happened to a neighbor of a friend. It took years to get it straightened out in court. My friend almost had to go testify. It was crazy scary because the group (some kind of religious group) is known for violence. They are all over the country. It isn't just foreclosures either. It has happened to houses where people live at another residence for months at a time. Scary stuff.

Sovereign citizens. They're an extremist group, mostly anarchist. They believe all this crazy stuff that basically the US government isn't legitimate and hasn't been since the dollar went off the gold standard.

ILoveBeachMusic · April 2021

MyNameIsNot said:

ILoveBeachMusic said:

There is some group that goes around squatting in vacant houses - changing locks just like @short+sassy said. It happened to a neighbor of a friend. It took years to get it straightened out in court. My friend almost had to go testify. It was crazy scary because the group (some kind of religious group) is known for violence. They are all over the country. It isn't just foreclosures either. It has happened to houses where people live at another residence for months at a time. Scary stuff.

Sovereign citizens. They're an extremist group, mostly anarchist. They believe all this crazy stuff that basically the US government isn't legitimate and hasn't been since the dollar went off the gold standard.

Yes, that was it. Like I said, it was scary. My friend was afraid to go outside of her house and she lives in a really nice neighborhood on a golf course!

FYI - Make sure you have permission to use your venue before you send invitations

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