Al Roker Entertainment, Inc的动态

Transcript

My name is Jennie Stephens, and I am the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation. Heirs property is land that has been passed down without a will over many generations, and what ever one member does can upset the ownership status for their other members. If you have a property and you die without a will and you have ten children, then each of them have a 110th interest in that property. Our people were told early on one way to preserve the land for the family is to leave it to the family. Now that was OK back when maybe there were 10 people, but you look at now that maybe they're 200 or 500 with this plot of land belonging to all of them. On my mother's side of the family, her grandmother and grandfather owned property in Alabama, and he wouldn't do a will to give it to his heirs. He thought it'd be too easy to lose it. If somebody wanted, they'd have to go to all the different heirs because they were thinking, hey, nobody's going to find all of those heirs and, you know, and take our property. It seems to make rational sense that you should at least have a majority rule. It only takes one person to buy an interest of a family member for there to now become a threat. And that interest could be 1%. It could be less than 1%. Person who purchased the land becomes the newest member of the family. That person is legally entitled to file a legal action. That would seek the forced sale of the entire property. When we look in 1920, therewere16,000,000acres of land and present day you look at there's only two million acres of black-owned land in the country. That's14,000,000 acres of land that had just disappeared from the black agricultural community. Black farmland lost in that 75 year period or so was worth $326 billion. Think about all of the wealth. That has been extracted from these families. We would like the issue of heirs property to go away. We know it won't because it only takes one generation for heirs property to happen again. We know it's not just an issue in our state, but it's an issue across the United States.