Marin supervisors will try to settle dispute over accidental sale of Tiburon residents’ land

A group of Circle Drive apartment owners is fighting to regain ownership of two shared pools, a recreation area and laundry facilities after Marin County mistakenly sold the common area for $6,600 at a tax auction — and the new owner wants $1 million or rent payments to get it back.

While the Tiburon View Homeowners Association has filed a lawsuit against Wyoming-based buyer AssetRenew LLC, which then countersued, the homeowners have also asked the county to rescind the sale.

A legally binding hearing before the Marin Board of Supervisors is now set for Feb. 11, as required by state law after the supervisors unanimously backed a Nov. 5 resolution to reverse the sale and AssetRenew, founded by Derek Leffers of Aptos, declined to approve it. The ruling can be appealed, so the dueling lawsuits are only on pause.

“Unfortunately, there is no comment. We’re not allowed to make any comment,” said the person who answered the phone number listed for AssetRenew before they hung up without identifying themselves.

The homeowners association comprises owners of a complex of eight parcels on Circle Drive, seven of which feature the buildings housing 68 apartment units. The eighth, center parcel features the common facilities, and under state law its value is supposed to be folded into the seven others. Instead, between 2013 and 2018, the county issued tax bills and penalties totaling $1,606 — bills that Marin Finance Director Mina Martinovich said the association “did not receive, nor should they have expected to receive.”

“We thought the parcel was vacant land because it had no assessed value for improvements,” Sandra Kacharos, the county finance department’s assistant director, said by email.

Kacharos said the county had identified three potential mailing addresses and sent notices to all three, but none were correct, while the tax-list sale was published three times in the Marin Independent Journal in February 2024, though not in The Ark.

Since no one paid up, the county then included the parcel in a March public auction for tax-defaulted property. Under state law, however, the common-area designation prohibits a lien, Martinovich said.

“It is impermissible to rely on an invalid tax lien as the basis for a tax sale; as such this sale must be rescinded,” she said in her November report to the Board of Supervisors.

Tiburon View’s attorney, Richard Zuromski of San Francisco-based Seifert Zuromski LLP, said operator Bayside Leasing and Property Management submitted a change of address to the U.S. Postal Service in 2010 when it moved from Mill Valley to Sausalito, but it never received any mail of overdue taxes.

He wrote in an August letter to the board that the management company and the association would have “immediately made efforts to redeem the common area parcel” had they received notice of the sale.

“At the end of the day, the hope is that the board rescinds the sale and the homeowners’ association can get past this issue,” Zuromski said in an interview. “Everybody just wants to go back to their private lives in the (association). That’s all there is.”

The case is similar to one in San Francisco in 2015, when a San Jose couple paid $90,000 at an online auction to purchase Presidio Terrace — an exclusive private street once home to late Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi — after the homeowners association failed to pay the $14 per year in property taxes on it for nearly two decades. In that case, the city had been mailing tax forms to a bookkeeper that had retired in the 1980s and had since died, but the sale itself was otherwise legal.

Then district Supervisor Mark Farrell called the couple “bottom-feeding pirates” as the case played out over two years, with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors splitting 7-4 to overturn the sale in late 2017.

In the Tiburon View lawsuit, filed in August, Zuromski wrote that since AssetRenew purchased the parcel, Leffers has “demanded payment of over $1 million” to buy it back, “held the association hostage for thousands of dollars in ‘rent’” for the parcel and “threatened to ‘evict’ (the association) from the common-area parcel.”

Zuromski said he was unaware of any impacts to the common area’s usage since the sale went through. Three residents reached by The Ark said they had no idea of the lawsuit or of the common area’s new landowner, and their usage had not been impacted save for one of the pools having been closed since about 2022, before the sale took place.

In an unsigned letter to the county in August, AssetRenew said it “specializes in purchasing properties at tax sales to take advantage of situations like the one at hand.”

The firm wrote that Zuromski reached out first to buy the land back, so the company got an appraisal, but “the association was upset with the number, so we offered a lease option.”

The letter said Zuromski emailed AssetRenew “with an extremely low amount,” threatening to sue, and AssetRenew told Zuromski the association could buy the property on the open market given the “multiple other offers on this property already.”

“It’s unfortunate that this happens as they were informed, we had been in discussions to sell the property,” the letter said.

In October, AssetRenew filed a cross-complaint against the homeowners association, seeking at least $52,220 in uncollected rent based on what the corporation calls a “fair rental value” of $7,460 per month for the land, which they claim is accruing, and any damages. It also seeks a partitioning of common-area parcel from the seven other parcels; a dissolution of the homeowners association because it no longer owns a “common-interest development,” which is required for a homeowners association; and an injunction that bans residents from using the common area.

A case-management conference is tentatively set for March 10.

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