Tim Bell explains how government entities end up with surplus properties. He uses a San Antonio case where an environmental impact study over a small spider left land unsold and available for purchase.
Alright, the next person on our list of the next item on our list here is surplus properties for sale. Now sometimes cities, county, states, other government entities have surplus properties that they sell. Okay? So here's an example of how a property might become a surplus property. Let's say that the county decides to build a road right over here, and there's a bunch of houses there now. And so the county goes in, they do what's called eminent domain, those houses. In other words, the law says that a government entity has the right to go in and force people to sell them their houses and force those people to move out if it's seen as being for the greater good of the whole, of the whole population. And so the county goes in and in eminent domains and buys all those houses. Then before they start building the road, they do an environmental impact study and they find out that there's this little spider that lives in that neighborhood right there. And if they tear down those houses and build that road there, that poor little spider will be extinct. And so they decide not to build the road there. So they come over here, they eminent domain all those houses and they build the road over here. Now before they build the road, though, of course they do the environmental impact study, find out there's nothing that's endangered there, and so they go ahead and they eminent domain, they buy the houses, they tear them down, they build the road. Well, what about the houses that were left over over here where they didn't build the road? What do they do? Those are called surplus properties. And, and those properties could be properties that you might be able to buy. By the way, that's a true story that actually happened a few years ago in San Antonio, Texas. There was a small spider that prevented them from building a road. So anyway, that's one example of how properties might become a surplus property for a city, county or state government also could be federal government too.
