TRURO — Across the Cape’s three outermost towns, there are 20 properties stuck in real estate purgatory. Year after year, town assessors mail out tax bills addressed to “owner unknown,” a figment of the bureaucratic imagination that rarely, if ever, pays a bill.
Truro has 12 properties whose owners are unknown. Provincetown and Wellfleet each have four such properties, and Eastham has none, according to the town’s assessors. The 20 properties — all vacant lots — cost the three outermost towns a combined $3,802 in tax revenue in fiscal 2026, a drop in the bucket compared to town budgets that range from $28 million to $44 million.
Although the owner-unknown properties here are mostly undevelopable, the fact that many have remained unresolved for decades speaks to the quirks and challenges of town government work.
“We’re reading handwritten deeds from the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, and the deeds are talking about going to the hollow at the oak tree!” Truro Assessor Jon Nahas said. “The way they describe things is very nonspecific, so things eventually just got lost in translation.
“Then things start changing hands, and when deeds change hands, it’s very common to just roll over the history and say, ‘Whatever rights you had, we’re giving that to the new owner,’ ” even if no one really knows what rights those are, Nahas said.
Sometimes, he said, people sell a quarter or an eighth of their possible interest in a piece of real estate, making things even more convoluted.
Buying an Interest
About four months ago, the Mattapoisett-based Frida LLC bought from Ree Hill Realty Trust all of its “right, title, or interest” in 9 Deer Path and 18 Stoney Hill Road, according to the deed. The LLC paid only $55,000 in a private sale that was not listed on the open market, according to assessors’ records.
Ree Hill Realty Trust had been the listed owner of the vacant 4.4-acre parcel at 9 Deer Path since 1990, but the adjacent 5.7-acre parcel at 18 Stoney Hill Road is still listed by the town as “owner unknown” — the only developable parcel on the Outer Cape with that status.
The Stoney Hill Road parcel has been in tax title since 1984, said Truro Finance Director Alex Lessin. That means the property taxes for that parcel have gone unpaid for decades.
A chain of legal claims to the land can be found at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds by working backward from the April transaction. They include several deeds, a will from 1949, and a sketch plan, none of which enumerate specific geographic boundaries.
For example, the 1949 will of Frank A. Rose doesn’t contain any addresses or specific landmarks but refers to “all wood lots owned by me which are situated in Truro.”
The April 2026 deed cites an 1846 sketch plan that purportedly describes…
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