Probate is one of the most interesting real property transactions in real estate. Let me share with you four unexpected turns of events that happened while my team and I were selling inherited houses that were going through probate court proceedings.
Most of the time sales of probate houses go smoothly. Everyone that is involved is cooperative and things go as planned. Sometimes that is not what happens.
- The most common scenario in sale the of inherited, probate houses is items get stolen from the house. It is usually by roommates, girlfriends, or even siblings who are living in the inherited house. And it usually happens when the Personal Representative is long distance. Then, when the Personal Representative travels to the house; they remember things that were in the house and have gone missing. They tell me stories about how some items of value were stolen from the house. They say to me, “Where is my cousin’s Rolex Watch, or what happened to that huge TV that was hanging on the wall?” I cannot imagine the feeling of Personal Representative who have no control over these matters. In all of the inherited houses I have sold and occupants were living in the house, items have been stolen from the house.
- In one instance, even before the first court hearing date and before the sale of the probate house, the house was broken into. The personal representative was worried the house was going to get broken into again and let a friend of a friend temporarily move into the house. She thought this was going to solve the break-in problems but it created a much bigger problem. Her friend of a friend moved eight other people into the house. We had buyers viewing the house with all these people living in the house. One of them was living in the garage with 5 space heaters and running up a huge electric bill and the electric bill was in the Personal Representative’s 80-year-old mother’s name. We got an offer on the house despite all of these occupants in the house. We let the occupants know well in advance the house needed to be vacated for the buyers. On the day of the final walk-through, the occupants were still living in the house. The buyers were willing to wait two weeks for the occupants to move and still, they would not move. Not surprisingly, the buyers decided they did not want to buy the house. We used a trick in the industry to get rid of the occupants. After they finally left, we cleaned the house, and put it back on the market for about $50,000 more than the original price! And, we got multiple offers in in just a few days.
- When trust documents are lost, it’s similar to not even having a trust. That is what happened to our good client. She had to go through probate since the trust was lost. We put the house on the market and we were all set to hand the keys over to the buyer-the very last step in a long, lengthy sale process. Things came to a screeching halt when the title company told us to stop everything we were doing. The title company wanted us to go back to court and get an order from the judge. This would have cost thousands of dollars and meant many more months in probate. After many phone calls, we found a replacement title company. The only thing we needed to do was get notarized wet signatures from all family members and some of them lived in Reno. We were all set to drive to Reno to get documents signed in Reno. Luckily, things went smoothly in the end.
- Another story was when an important probate document called a Notice of Proposed Action or NOPA for short was not filed with the court. The probate attorney did not file this document with the court. The title company flagged this and made us stop everything we were doing and would not proceed until the NOPA was filed with the court. In addition, it is necessary to wait 15 days for the recipients of the NOPA to respond. It was a stressful time and we were lucky in this case in that the probate attorney was able to get a waiver to work around the NOPA document.
Never underestimate the power of a title company to control the sale of the house. Plus, never, never use a title and escrow company that knows nothing about Sacramento probate sales. They can either make or break the sale.
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