Seven States Down, Forty-Three to Go: The Squatter Fix Is Not Complicated

Point first: a squatter almost never walks away owning your house. The racket is what it costs you to prove he doesn’t.

South Carolina just handed property owners a faster way to find out. On June 25, both chambers of the Legislature passed a bill, unanimously, letting an owner file a petition with a magistrate court laying out that a stranger has moved into a residential property without permission. Meet the conditions and the court issues an immediate ex-parte order removing the occupant, with a hearing to follow within 24 hours. County sheriffs and constables enforce it. Gov. Henry McMaster signed it. Six other states got there first. California still hasn’t moved.

I spend most of my working life advising family offices on real estate and private credit portfolios, and squatting calls have gone from rare to routine. A client acquires a distressed single-family home, sends someone to change the locks, and finds a stranger’s furniture in the living room and a fabricated lease on the counter. That stranger isn’t going to own the house in five years. But getting him out can take months, and that gap is where the damage happens.

Start with what a squatter actually is. Under American law, he’s someone occupying property without permission, who hasn’t paid rent, doesn’t have a lease, and isn’t family. Adverse possession, the doctrine people call “squatters’ rights,” lets an occupant eventually claim title, but only after clearing a brutal checklist: open, hostile, exclusive, continuous possession for years, plus, in states like California, paying every dollar of property tax on a house that isn’t his. Almost nobody clears that bar. California’s clock runs five years, and the tax requirement alone kills most claims before they start.

So, if squatters almost never win title, why does this feel like a disaster for owners? Because until recently, the law made no distinction between a career squatter running a fake-lease scam and a legitimate tenant dispute. Both got routed into the same slow civil process, and a homeowner had to burn months and thousands of dollars proving what should have been obvious from the driveway.

Florida led with House Bill 621, effective July 2024, which lets a sheriff remove a qualifying unlawful occupant off a sworn owner complaint, no lawsuit required. Georgia’s House Bill 1017 gets a squatter off the property in three days if he can’t produce a lease. Alabama gives owners a fast, sheriff-driven removal option under a law signed in May 2024. Tennessee cut a process that used to run up to two years down to 72 hours. West Virginia’s Stop Squatters Act treats the whole thing as criminal trespass from the jump, arrest included. Texas joined the club with Senate Bill 1333, effective September 2025, which lets a sheriff or constable put the owner back in possession on a sworn complaint and skip the courthouse entirely. Illinois reclassified squatters as criminal trespassers rather than tenants as of January 1 this year. Now South Carolina makes seven.

None of these laws touch an actual landlord-tenant dispute. Every one excludes current or former tenants and family members by design, and every one attaches real penalties, felony charges in South Carolina’s case, for an owner who misuses the process. That’s the right balance: due process where a real tenancy dispute exists, and a fast exit for the guy with a lease he printed off his own computer an hour before the sheriff arrived.

Compare that to California, which has enacted none of it. An owner there still can’t so much as change a lock without risking civil liability. The only legal route is an unlawful detainer action in Superior Court, and the state’s own courts put the minimum timeline at three to four months even in an uncontested case. Self-help is illegal, adverse possession claims are rare enough to be theoretical, and none of that matters to the owner carrying a mortgage, taxes, and insurance on a house he can’t use. The state that prides itself on protecting the vulnerable has built the slowest and most expensive path back to your own front door of any state on this list.

The predictable objection is that speed invites abuse, that a magistrate acting on a sworn petition is a rougher instrument than a full trial, and that a disputed occupancy could get bulldozed along with the fraud. It’s a fair worry, and it’s exactly why South Carolina and every other state on this list carves out tenants and family members and imposes felony penalties for a false complaint. An owner willing to commit perjury to skip a hearing was never going to be deterred by a slower process. He was just going to have more months to do damage while the case dragged through court.

The fix isn’t complicated, and it isn’t partisan, whatever the reflexive framing suggests. Criminalize squatting. Make it clear by statute that a squatter is not a tenant. Give courts or sheriffs authority to act on a sworn complaint, with real penalties for abuse. Keep adverse possession’s bar high enough that paying five straight years of somebody else’s property tax bill is the only door left open. Seven states have done all four and turned a months-long crisis into a days-long inconvenience. The rest have no excuse left for sitting on their hands.

Property rights don’t stop mattering at the state line, and the owner losing sleep over a stranger in his house in Sacramento has the identical problem as the one in Columbia. Seven states have fixed it. Forty-three still have work to do.