When does the law allow you to treat potentially false claims as legitimate? More often than you’d think! For example, the word “owner” seems pretty basic, but in common legal contexts, “owner” technically means “person who claims to be the owner,” whether or not they actually own the property. For example, in Oregon, the law relating to construction liens specifically states that “’Owner’ means: (a) A person that is or claims to be the owner” of a property.
This may seem like odd phrasing–why is an owner not only the actual owner, but also someone who “claims” to be the owner? In the context of contracting, the owner–from the contractor’s perspective–might be a tenant who has a right in their lease agreement to have renovations done on the property (for example, a commercial tenant). Thus, the person hiring the contractor might not actually be the legal owner of the property, but nonetheless is the decision maker/”owner” as far as the contractor is concerned.
Additionally, in many states, a contractor is not under a specific legal obligation to verify that the person hiring them to do construction on a property actually owns the property. This may seem weird, but remember that the law doesn’t require a plumber to do a title search to make sure you own your toilet before they do work on it. It’s similar to taking your car into the mechanic. A mechanic is not required to do a title search to see if you are the owner of the car, and they are not required to contact BMW Financial to verify that you are actually leasing your BMW. They are simply allowed to start work on the car if you drop it off and sign a contract to pay for the work.
One reason for this is that the law puts the blame on the person who misrepresents their ownership of property, not on the party who relied on this misrepresentation in good faith. If a mechanic in good faith works on a car that was stolen, it’s not the mechanic’s fault that the customer lied about their ownership of the car. A key aspect of this concept is the “in good faith” part; an example of bad faith would be a ten-year-old child dropping off a car and asking the mechanic to repair it, and the mechanic obliging. If a lie about car ownership were not superficially credible, then the mechanic would be acting in bad faith by believing it. However, if a mechanic has no clear reason to doubt the fake owner, then the responsibility is usually on the fake owner, not on the mechanic.
I’d like to take a moment here to remind you that I’m not a legal professional–please do not take any of this as legal advice, and check your state’s laws before you do something wild!
Since a contractor is not generally required to do a title search for ownership of a property, then the owner (from the contractor’s perspective) is simply the person who hires the contractor to do the work. That said, if the person who hires the contractor does not pay them, the contractor cannot place a lien on the property if the hiring party did not have any legitimate rights to the property. This is why contractors usually do their best to verify ownership information. 
Of course, if your contractor is pulling permits and doing other county-related paperwork, then the issue of who actually owns the property will likely come up. Also, if the contractor wants to avoid legal issues and get paid, then it’s a good idea to make a basic attempt to verify ownership information. Remember that a contractor may have to prove they acted in good faith in the event of a dispute. For example, if someone said “I don’t own this house but I want you to renovate it,” then you could be at fault for working on a house that you conclusively knew the hiring party did not own. It’s best to have some evidence that you verified ownership, since this can prove you acted in good faith.
That said, it’s often surprising to people that technically, you might be able walk over to your neighbor’s house and hire a contractor to rip off their roof without their consent, and the contractor likely would not be blamed for this. The contractor would probably have to prove in court that a person who plausibly seemed to be the owner ordered the renovations, but other than that, the responsibility would likely lie on the person pretending to own the property.
As this example demonstrates, the meanings of words are not universal in law. This is why each statute usually starts with pages of definitions that define basic phrases and what they mean in that specific statute. This is also a reminder that law is philosophy by another name, where a seemingly basic term might mean its opposite, like when “owner” might mean “person who does not own the property.”
