He bought a foreclosed home free of liens—and ended up hit with a multi-million dollar fine: “It’s like having a bomb dropped on me”

When Denny Dorcey bought his home in Oakland Park, Florida, it was a foreclosure property. He was told there were no fines or liens attached to it. Everything seemed perfectly normal. It was his dream home, and he planned to renovate it to his liking. As an American contractor, owning his own home had always been a personal goal—and now it was finally happening.

That is, until he received a letter from the city itself, informing him he owed more than a million dollars in fines tied to various code violations. “It’s like having a bomb dropped on me. I just couldn’t believe it,” he told the New York Post.

The city of Oakland Park claimed he was responsible for $1,097,400 in penalties related to four violations caused by the previous homeowner. No one had mentioned this crucial detail when he purchased the property. Now, he had no idea how to handle the fines, which were tied to issues like garbage in the garage and overgrown vegetation in the front and back yards—conditions the city had deemed a fire hazard.

The violations had been sitting on record for years, completely unknown to Dorcey. When he went to City Hall to try to resolve the situation, he explained there was no way he could afford to pay such an amount. Officials advised him to try negotiating with the city’s collections department.

The city later stated that it had never been informed the property had gone through foreclosure before Dorcey became the owner. “Government agencies do not have to notify a new owner about the fines, allowing them to grow,” legal expert Howard Finkelstein told WSVN. “But in this case, the city cannot do this to Dorcey because he bought the property in foreclosure and that wiped out any existing liens and fines that the city had.”

Eventually, the city dropped the seven-figure fine and the lien was removed. A happy ending for a new homeowner whose dream briefly turned into a nightmare.

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