A three-bedroom house on Garfield Avenue in Nunn, Colorado, is for sale for $215,280, and the listing tells you almost nothing you’d normally want to know before buying a home. No interior photos. No inspections. No showings. What it does tell you, plainly, is that the house is occupied, that you cannot disturb whoever is inside, and that removing them is your problem, not the seller’s. The listing agent, according to KYGO, has never actually set foot inside the property.
Fifteen years, two courts, one house
The occupant is Tori McMechan, a former town clerk and treasurer for Nunn, a small community about 25 miles north of Fort Collins. She and her husband bought the 2,040-square-foot house in 2006. He died in a car crash in 2010, the same year the mortgage stopped getting paid, because the loan was in his name alone and the lender would not work with her as his surviving spouse. That single administrative wall, one name on one piece of paper, is where a 15-year legal fight began.
The loan eventually landed with Deutsche Bank, which filed for judicial foreclosure in 2022, and a district court authorized the sale of the house in September 2023. Colorado is a judicial-foreclosure state for cases like this one, meaning the bank cannot simply repossess and sell the property administratively. It has to win a court order first, which is part of why a house that stopped receiving mortgage payments around 2010 didn’t reach a for-sale listing until 2026. In the years between, McMechan pursued the case through at least six separate legal proceedings, arguing at points that the mortgage had changed hands between companies without proper documentation, according to Local 12. She won some rounds, including an appellate reversal on procedural grounds, and lost others. Last year, the Colorado Court of Appeals rejected her remaining claims as lacking the legal merit to stop the sale.
A listing built around a legal standoff
That court loss is what produced the Zillow listing now generating so much attention. The house was originally posted at $233,000 before dropping to its current $215,280 on July 21, per the reporting from Wealth of Geeks, republished via Yahoo Finance. Zillow’s own description spells out the terms bluntly: sold occupied, sight-unseen, no access, no showings, no inspections, no trespassing, and no disturbing the occupant. Whoever buys the property is buying a legal problem along with a 0.48-acre lot, and everybody involved knows it.
McMechan has made clear she isn’t planning to make that problem easy to solve. Her stated position, reported by multiple outlets, is that she intends to stay in the house and will not leave on her own, framing any removal as something a buyer or the courts will have to force. Her remaining legal option runs through a 2024 change to Colorado law that gives people facing eviction the right to a jury trial, a process that could stretch her timeline out even further and make the property even less appealing to a typical buyer.
Why the listing looks the way it does
None of this is really Zillow’s doing, or even, strictly, the listing agent’s. The wording on the page reads less like marketing copy and more like a legal disclosure, because that’s effectively what it is: the bank has a court order to sell, but it does not have physical possession of the house, has never inspected the inside of it, and cannot legally send anyone in to look without McMechan’s cooperation, which she has not given. That leaves the listing agent describing a property nobody representing the seller has actually seen, which is how you end up with a real estate ad built entirely out of restrictions instead of selling points.
What that means for whoever bids
Real estate listings like this one are unusual enough that they tend to go viral for the spectacle of it, and this one has: screenshots of the Zillow page have circulated widely online since it was first posted. But strip away the novelty and what’s left is a fairly ordinary, if extreme, version of a problem that shows up more often than people realize in foreclosure sales, where a bank ends up owning a property it has never actually seen the inside of and has no leverage to get anyone to leave voluntarily. Whoever eventually closes on 408 Garfield Avenue is really buying a seat at a table in a fight that’s already run a decade and a half, with no court date on the calendar promising it wraps up any time soon.
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