North Carolina Land Sales Expert Eric Andrews explains Real Estate and Attractive Nuisances in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: It’s a doctrine applying to the law of torts, where a landowner is liable for injuries to a child for having something that is a magnet to a kid.
Speaker 2: Like a nice swimming pool on your front yard?
Speaker 1: There’s actually a top 10. Do you want to hear it?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Number 10 would be railroads and trains and the tracks and the railroad stations. Kids can’t get away from those things. And guess what happens? They get run over. They get run over. The next biggest thing is skateboard, ramps, trampolines, zip lines, tree houses, play equipment. Stuff like that kids are naturally attracted to. Holes in the ground. Kids cannot resist a hole on the ground, like an open sewer or a culvert or something like that. They just cannot resist those things. Old cars. They have to go into old cars. Farm equipment. They’re going to get onto some farm equipment and that can be bad.
Discarded appliances. Remember the movie Back to the Future? The original storyline was that they went into a refrigerator and went back in time. But the movie producers were so scared that a bunch of kids were going to crawl into refrigerators and die that they changed it to a DeLorean. But discarded appliances… Kids jump into those. Ponds and quarries. Unfortunately, we have a quarry here. We’ve lost so many kids just since I’ve lived here, at a local quarry. Power lines. I have no idea why kids would be attracted to power lines, but believe it or not, that’s number three on the list. Power lines. They want to climb those towers, which I think is crazy. Construction sites are a big one. Kids love construction sites. The dirt and the heavy equipment and whatever they’re building. But the number one, you hit it, is pools. Seems like kids at any age are attracted to pools. Most insurance companies in this country will require that you have a gated fence around your pool. It’s a big thing.
When we represent landlords, there are certain things that we have to make sure are safe for the neighbors, and then the tenants want to have something. You don’t have to drive very far in North Carolina to see a bunch of trampolines. If you just have that in your backyard and the neighbor’s kid comes over and breaks their neck on the trampoline, you could be liable. So it’s a big to-do in North Carolina. It’s big to-do everywhere, but those are attractive nuisances.
