This is planet money from NPR.
If it were not for a small herd of goats, Burt banks never would have landed in the middle of a totally mind bending legal conflict.
The story starts a couple years ago, when Burt decided it was time to finally deal with some family land he inherited.
It's about 3 miles from the ocean.
It was very rural, a great place to grow up.
The land was around the corner from his childhood home in Delaware.
We lived next to my grandparents, and they had a chicken farm and some property in that area.
His grandparents bucolic land, or a piece of it.
That is the land at the center of this story.
Burt lives in Atlanta now, works as a financial advisor, but he still makes visits back home.
In the 16 years since he inherited the land, he and his husband go by occasionally even toy with the idea of building a summer house there.
In the end, though, they decide it just made more sense to sell it.
So Burt got together with his brother Ralph, packaged five little lots together, and they found a buyer pretty quickly.
A local real estate developer.
Burt doesn't remember the exact figure, but he says the price was somewhere in the $300 to $400,000 range.
Everything was going great.
The prospective buyer was going through all the steps, has the land surveyed, and then I.
Burt got a call from his realtor.
She contacted us and said, uh oh, you've got a problem.
You've got an encroachment, and the purchaser does not want to move forward until the encroachment is removed.