Prospects of selling a house next door to a "reformed" spree killer?

 Any realtors reading?

Let's say someone like Kip Kinkel - schizophrenic kid who killed his
parents and shot up his school about 10 years ago - got a commutation
of his sentence as some people think he should since they feel he was
a "victim" who didn't get the help he needed and was treated unfairly,
and was in the market to buy a house. They're convinced that with meds
and supervision he would probably have no problems living as a free
man.

I assume realtors aren't going to turn down his money so I imagine
he'd find someone to sell him a house,  but even if they make an
effort to conceal who the new neighbor is, I imagine at some point
word is going to get out that he lives in that house.

Would you even be able to give away any of the nearby houses once it
became common knowledge? Or, if a realtor made efforts to conceal this
fact when selling a neighboring house, do the buyers have any recourse?

  thedarkonelives@hotmail.com wrote:

Word predisposition comes to mind.

 On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:57:03 -0700 (PDT), thedarkonelives@hotmail.com
wrote:


So you're a card carrying member of NIMBY huh?

Any person who has served his time in incarceration, is entitled to
live somewhere. Technically, YOU, the prospective neighbor is not
necessarily entitled to know that this person WAS ever incarcerated.

Even if you did find out, there is no legal recourse you can take to
force him to move elsewhere.

 <thedarkonelives wrote


Laws may not *allow* the relator to disclose such even if they are aware of
it.  The home owner may or may not be required to disclose such, rather area
dependant on disclosure laws.

In my area for example, folks selling are advised to 'not disclose' as you
can't be sued later for anything that comes up.  If you do 'disclose' you
can be sued even years later for just about anything even if you can prove
you did NOT know about it (obviously hard to prove such, and wont save you
here).

'Technically' my house was bought 'non-disclosed' but folks have a way here
of working out basic stuff 'off the record'.  Seller for example quietly
warned us that with a house built in 1963, it was largely code-spec to 1963
and that future work, depending on what it was, would sometimes entail
additional costs.  He was real careful to explain the back room was codespec
only to 'enclosed porch' for example and now we understand why ;-).  Reality
is at the time it was a rental bedroom for a roomate, bed and all.  It's a
'legal thing' to call my home a 3BR 1.5 bath, vice a 4 BR 1.5 bath.  Had he
tried to market it as a 4 BR officially, he would have been required to pay
to bring that encloser to codespec of the time for a BR.

 cshenk wrote:

Are you sure about that? I would think it would be the reverse: Disclosure
immunizes you from being sued in that the buyer knew what he was getting.
Non-disclosure allows the buyer to presume nothing abnormal about the
property.