We have been dealing with my dear departed grandmothers estate recently and there has been a bit of how I say, tension over the issue of her house and flats. My mother wishes to sell them and split them and my Uncle OTH wants to keep them “in the family”. Its not a major disagreement and it will probably be resolved soon. But, how did dopers deal with parental property after they had left this life?
In my own case, I think my Uncle is being sentimental, the house is not the one they grew up in (long since sold) and he dose not even live in the city, it is empty.
At least my dear sister lucked out and got grannys car.
Thinking back - my dad was finally able to sell his parents’ house after his father was dead and his mother moved to a small apartment. How could we have known that in a few decades, it would be located in a very desirable part of the city?? The place he was glad to unload for $4K morphed into a $300K showplace! Then the market tanked, but still…
My parents bought the other grandparents’ house from the estate, and sold it to my youngest sister. No tensions there - no one else wanted to live there.
My brother is the executor of my mom’s estate (Dad is long gone) and I believe the plan is to sell it and divide the proceeds among the 5 of us sibs. It’s a large house with a pool and a lot of land, and I don’t think any of them want it - I certainly don’t. My daughter loves the place, but she could never afford it on a teacher’s salary, so it will leave the family when Mom dies. No sentimental attachment for me - my folks moved there 6 years after I was out on my own - I never lived there, so I don’t view it as part of me. Plus it’s more than 2 hours from where I do live, and I’m quite happy here, thanks.
Oddly enough, the sale of my parents’ house closed yesterday. There is only my brother and I, so we are sharing the proceeds. My parents only lived there for a few years and it had no sentimental value to either of us. My brother lives with a partner in that town in a different house, and I am married and live in another city.
When my grandmother died a few years back, my dad and uncles sold it. It took a while to sell - the market was collapsing and they were convinced they could get more for it than they could - or that maybe they should hang onto it until the market rebounded. I sat in my house with my Dad who said “well, there isn’t much like this out there” and I said "there are three with the identical floorplan in my neighborhood for listed for $20k less that aren’t selling - and my neighborhood is better. "
They dropped the price and it sold.
I spent seven years living down the street from a house that sat empty all seven years I lived there. Mom and Dad had died, they kids all had their own places - some apparently far away, but they couldn’t agree to sell the home. So for seven years - and probably longer - they paid for someone to maintain it, paid taxes, paid enough utilities so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. No one visited it.
My parents signed their house over to Hubster and me in the early Nineties. They owned it free and clear. We turned around and got a mortgage on it to make some repairs/improvements. I also gave my sister a substantial amount of money (maybe about a third of the mortgage) since the house was our inheritance from our parents.
I raised my kids in the house where I had been raised.
In 2005, my husband got sick, and the two of us decided to retire and move to our property in NE AZ. We fixed up the house for sale, stuck all our crap in storage, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The house didn’t sell. In fact, you could say that we were totally to blame for the beginning of the collapse in the real estate market. As soon as our house was listed, PFFFFT, the bottom fell out.
And we ended up losing the house.
Momma was gone by then, but Daddy was still alive. And Daddy, being Daddy, felt badly for US, because he hadn’t been in a position to help us hang on until the house could sell.
I choked up and told him I was the one who had screwed up by losing “my mother’s house” and I needed to apologize to HIM.
Making a bunch of stories short, in my family the situations are:
one person (be widowed spouse or living-at-home child) does not legally have full right to the house, but the rest of the heirs give them either “full use” or “full use and disposal” (in this second case, if the person using the house sells it, they have to give the rest their part of the proceedings - but the decision to sell is theirs, not collective).
there is only one heir.
house sold and proceedings split.
Those situations where one heir blocks the sale for everybody else are horrible; considering the level of fuss that a single pair of earrings generated among two of my father’s siblings, I sure hope I never find myself in that mess.
The decision to sell or keep is so very personal for each family. These days the housing market will also be a factor as there is nothing solid there anymore. In our situation, there were no heirs that wanted to move into the house so we decided to sell. Our parents were smart and left great details in the trust and will so nothing was really questionable.
That is a great gift to leave for your family, get it all sorted out in advance.
I lived in my mom’s house a few years after she died but the neighborhood took a serious turn for the worst so my brother and I sold it to a rental group and split the money. The next year a renter was shot and killed during a drug deal. I’m assuming he was the dealer. A few years later it burned to the ground. I drove by recently and found that several other homes had also burned down.
Oh boy, am I dreading this: my grandfather-in-law died last night. AFAIK, the will stipulates that the farm be divided equally between the two sons, and the land has already been surveyed. But there’s only one house (worth, basically, nothing: a very basic ranch that hasn’t been updated since 1974.) The brothers will battle until one dies or one kills the other and goes to prison. They will do the same with each and every item in the house, the barns, and so forth.
Personally, I am willing that my brother inherit every atom my mother owns rather than argue, and vice versa. (In reality, it’s likely that her home will be sold, with the residue of the estate put in trust for equal division among the grandchildren. Bobby and I will choose a few personal items to keep - nothing valuable, just sentimental - and sell, donate, or trash the rest.)
Get an appraisal. Offer it to the uncle for the appraisal value minus real estate fees and any other expenses related to selling the real estate that will not occur if he outright buys it. He has his chance to keep it in the family. The rest of you sell it either way.
When my mom’s parents died, they left the house equally to her and her three brothers. My parents bought out their share (my mom was the only child who lived in the same town, and one of two who still lived in the same state) and put it on the rental market. They still own it & have tenants …
My friend bought her grandmothers house from the estate when she died. Her mom and her two sisters inherited equally so selling was the only way to split the proceeds. She paid 2/3 of the value of the house outright through a mortgage to her two aunts and had a deal with her mother to pay the final third to her in direct interest free payments. She got way more house than she could otherwise have afforded at the time and the home stayed in the family.
We sold Mom’s house. One brother made a lot of noise about wanting to purchase it, but wouldn’t commit to it in time and the place was sitting, unsold, for months before my other brothers (the executors) finally listed it.
If the uncle wants to keep it in the family, then he should offer to buy out the other sibling(s)'s shares and own it himself. I think it’d be a nightmare to have the properties co-owned.