Maryland

A great many Baltimore rowhouses are not owned outright, but sit on ground rent: a 99-year lease, perpetually renewable, in which someone else owns the land beneath the house while the occupant owns the building and pays a small yearly sum, often under fifty dollars.

For most of the system’s history a missed payment could cost the tenant everything, because the ground lease holder could re-enter and eject, and the occupant lost the house and all the equity in it over an arrears smaller than a month’s wages.

After a *Baltimore Sun* investigation in 2006 the General Assembly rewrote the system in 2007, creating a state registry, a 60-day billing requirement and a lien remedy in place of ejectment, though the courts later struck down both the automatic extinguishment of unregistered ground rents and the removal of the ejectment remedy.

Everything now turns on whether the ground rent was registered.

A ground lease that is not on the Department of Assessments and Taxation’s registry cannot be collected, cannot be enforced by suit and cannot support an ejectment action.

Older leases written before April 1884 as irredeemable have mostly become redeemable too, because holding on to irredeemability requires filing a notice in the land records and refiling it every ten years, and many holders never did.

So a ground rent appearing on a Maryland title abstract is a question rather than a bill — whether it was ever registered, whether anyone has preserved it, and whether there is anything left to redeem — and answering it is usually a matter of time rather than money.