When a parent dies and leaves a house behind, most families jump straight to the big question: Do we sell it, rent it, or keep it? It’s a natural place to start, but it’s almost always the wrong one. Before anyone can answer it, the family has to figure out who’s actually allowed to make the call, what the place is really worth, and how they’ll cover the bills while they sort out the rest. Skip those steps, and the mistakes get expensive fast. Families line up a buyer before anyone can legally sign, cling to a price no buyer will pay, or let a missed mortgage payment snowball into something much worse.
The people who handle these properties see those mistakes from different angles. Bryan Devore, a Realtor and Director of Senior Services at Devore Realty Group, part of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties, works mostly with seniors and their families in the San Diego area and handles estate and probate sales alongside downsizing moves; the two often involve the same dated houses and the same adult children.
Justin Mitchell, founder of Maryland Cash Home Buyers, fields a steady flow of calls from heirs and aging owners deciding what to do with long-held family homes. Alexander Paykin, Managing Director of Paykin Law in New York, litigates the cases where those questions went unanswered long enough to land in court. Together, their perspectives shed light on a process that can feel opaque to families going through it for the first time.
The first question an inherited home raises is a legal one, and its answer sets the pace for everything else: who has the authority to sell? A house held in a living trust usually passes to a successor trustee, who can generally act without a court. A house that passes any other way typically goes through probate, where a court appoints an executor or administrator and oversees much of what that person can do.
Devore, whose team handles both kinds of sales, describes probate as a process that layers an attorney, the court, and the decedent’s relatives onto what is otherwise an ordinary transaction, and he puts precision ahead of speed. “It’s super critical that everything is followed to the letter of the law,” he says, “because we’ve heard of situations where it wasn’t, and things kind of go sideways.”
Even inside probate, the degree of authority varies, and the difference reshapes the sale. California, Devore’s market, lets courts grant an executor either full or limited authority under the state’s Independent Administration of Estates Act. With full authority, the executor can sell much as any owner would, once heirs have had 15 days’ notice to object. With limited authority, or after an heir objects, the sale goes before a judge, the accepted price must reach at least 90% of the court-appointed referee’s appraisal, and other buyers can show up at the hearing and outbid the original offer.
Having the authority to sell doesn’t mean having a free hand. Whoever holds it still answers to the estate’s own terms, and those terms can decide how the house sells before the family weighs in. Mitchell recently heard from a woman who had inherited a house in need of major renovation; as he understands it, the estate required her to try for fair market value before considering a discounted cash offer. She listed the house at its $150,000 appraisal, a price neither Mitchell nor his partners would pay. If the listing fails, he expects a cash sale would land closer to $100,000. Either way, the estate’s rule, not her own read of the market, set the sequence: she had the authority to sell, but not the freedom to choose how.
Most heirs first learn what an inherited home is worth from someone else’s number, usually an appraisal or a Zillow estimate, and neither one tells them what a buyer will actually pay. The appraisal earns its keep at tax time: an heir’s cost basis generally resets to the home’s value on the day the owner died, which can shrink or wipe out the capital gain on a later sale, as Kiplinger explains. The trouble starts when that figure becomes the asking price, as it did for Mitchell’s caller, who stuck to her $150,000 appraisal.
Online estimates widen the gap. Most sellers who call Mitchell for a cash offer have taken a Zillow number and shaved a little off. “They’re knocking off $20,000, and that’s their price,” he says. A cash buyer, though, has to cover closing, holding and renovation costs and still clear a profit, often 10% or more, so no investor can pay fair market value and stay in business. For sellers who won’t budge, Mitchell points to an as-is listing, which might cost them $20,000 to $30,000 in fees and closing costs but land them near their number.
Condition widens or narrows the gap, and inherited homes tend to arrive with decades-old kitchens and baths. Devore sees a recurring disconnect between the houses his older clients own and what today’s buyers want, which usually means quartz countertops and stainless steel appliances. “Usually, it is a good home, it just needs those updates,” he says.
His answer is arithmetic, not persuasion. Devore lays out what the house would likely sell for as it stands next to what it would likely bring after targeted upgrades, and if the difference is big enough, the family takes it seriously. Two options help when money or patience runs short: renovation services his team arranges that defer payment until the home closes escrow, so no one has to front the cost, and guaranteed as-is sales that can close within about 10 days for families who value a fixed timeline over a higher price.
A mortgage doesn’t die with the borrower. The good news is that it doesn’t come due the moment they’re gone, either. Federal law bars lenders from calling the loan just because the house passed to a relative, and servicers have to treat confirmed heirs much like borrowers, according to the legal publisher Nolo. The catch is that the payments keep coming. Miss enough of them while the estate gets sorted out, and the servicer can still foreclose. Reverse mortgages are the exception: a federally insured one generally comes due once the last surviving borrower dies, as 24/7 Wall St. notes.
Fall behind, and a second clock starts ticking, one that runs at very different speeds from state to state. In New York, where Paykin represents both lenders and homeowners, a 2022 law makes it harder for lenders to revive stale foreclosures, and the state’s highest court applied it to older cases in late 2025. “If a bank sits on a case, on a foreclosure for too long, they stand the risk of waiving it entirely,” he says. Yet the same courts have lost patience with delay as a homeowner’s strategy. “They’re going to rule for somebody,” Paykin says, “and they’re not going to take as much nonsense as they used to.”
New York is also one of the slowest places in the country to lose a house. It’s a judicial-foreclosure state, where every case goes through a court, and ATTOM data puts it among the states with the longest timelines. California and Maryland, by contrast, mostly let lenders foreclose without going to court, according to SoFi, and in the fastest states, such as West Virginia and Texas, the process averaged under six months in late 2025, per ATTOM figures reported by Lawyers.com. Wherever the house sits, the upshot for heirs is the same: don’t assume the lender will wait while the family sorts things out. Call the loan servicer early, and keep making payments in the meantime.
Family fights over a house are rarely about the house; they’re about what each person needs from it. Devore sees the split even before a parent dies. Sometimes the children push a reluctant parent toward a senior community; sometimes the parent wants to sell, and the children object because they may want the house someday. He listens to everyone but keeps his role narrow. “I try to stay out of the situation,” he says. “I just need to provide the resources for them.”
Once the parent is gone and several heirs own the house, a standoff can end in court, with one heir suing to force a sale, a lawsuit known as a partition action. Paykin handles these cases. Since you can’t split one house among several owners, the court essentially has to order it sold. Because the sale is the whole point, Paykin keeps a licensed brokerage alongside his law practice, so his office can list and sell the property without bringing in another party.
New York has softened that process for inherited homes. Under its Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, in effect since 2019, the court must first hold a settlement conference and set a fair market value. Heirs who want to keep the house then get a chance to buy out those who want to sell, and any sale generally goes to the open market instead of a courthouse auction. Still, it’s a lawsuit among relatives, and families who settle the question at the kitchen table keep the control a court would otherwise take.
Every question above turns on local specifics: the state’s probate rules, the wording of the will or trust, the terms of the loan, the condition of the kitchen. The good news is that each one has someone who can answer it. An estate or probate attorney in the state where the house sits can settle who has the authority to sell. An accountant can document the date-of-death value for tax purposes. The loan servicer can confirm what the family owes and how much time it has. And an agent who handles probate and trust sales can say what the house will bring, as is or updated.
Paykin remembers when clients routinely showed up with that kind of team; today many arrive with a plan from an AI chatbot instead, and he doesn’t mind that as a starting point. “I’m all in favor of technology,” he says. A chatbot can help a family figure out which questions to ask, and the professionals who know the local rules can answer them.
The practitioners who handle inherited homes describe their job less as delivering verdicts than as putting the real options in front of a family. Devore treats his role with older owners as listening and laying out the paths, since a family that doesn’t know an option exists will never choose it. Mitchell built his business around two of those paths, so that a seller who calls about a cash offer also hears what a listing might bring. For heirs, the order of the questions matters as much as the questions themselves: settle who can sign, learn what the house will truly bring, keep the loan current, and agree among the family before anyone asks what to do with the place.
About the Experts: Alexander Paykin, Managing Director of Paykin Law in New York, handles real estate and commercial litigation and transactions. Bryan Devore, Realtor and Director of Senior Services at Devore Realty Group in Carlsbad, California, works with older homeowners and their families. Justin Mitchell, founder of Maryland Cash Home Buyers in Frederick, Maryland, buys homes for cash.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
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