"My Family Can't Agree On Selling" — And The House Just Sits There.

"My sister is living in our mom's house and the rest of us want to sell"

You're not the first family in this position, and the shape of it is almost always the same. One of you is in the house. The rest are somewhere else — often out of state. Whoever is in the house has no cash, but has been living with the property's problems every day. Whoever is out of state has opinions, a share of the value, and no interest in wiring money to Miami for a roof they'll never stand under.

Everybody is being reasonable from where they're standing. That's exactly why it doesn't resolve on its own.

"I've kept this house up for years — shouldn't I get that money back?"

If that's your position it's a fair one, and it's worth knowing in advance how it tends to land. We bought a house in South Miami where a sister was living in the property and her brother was in Oklahoma. She wanted to be paid back for repairs she'd made over the years.

Here's the hard part nobody wants to say out loud: much of that work wasn't visible in the price. Maintenance that keeps a house from getting worse — a water heater, a patched leak, paint — doesn't add to what a buyer pays. It just prevents a deduction. So the amount she felt she was owed and the amount the house was actually worth more because of it were two different numbers, and the brother wasn't going to pay the difference.

A cash offer resolved it because it produced one number and one date. Instead of arguing about the value of past work, the family was dividing a specific sum on a specific day. Whatever they agreed between themselves about her share, they were agreeing about real money, not a hypothetical sale price.

"Nobody can even tell us what the house is worth"

A duplex-style property in Coconut Grove had an older couple living on one side and the other side sitting vacant. It was dated — 1990s finishes, roof leaking — on a piece of ground everyone agreed was excellent. The heirs were a niece in Tampa and an uncle near Philadelphia.

The realtors they spoke to couldn't give them a straight value, because the repairs made the comparable sales unusable. So the family had two out-of-state owners, one live-in household, rents that no longer covered rising taxes and insurance, and no agreed number to argue about.

That's the state a house can sit in for years. What broke it was a firm offer on the property as it stood, with the occupants staying put, so the decision became yes or no rather than an open-ended debate about what the house might be worth if somebody fixed it.

"Why would a cash sale settle this?"

• Nobody has to fund anything. The heir with money isn't asked to invest in a house the others live in.
• No repair negotiation. There's no inspection report for heirs to fight about line by line.
• One date. Everyone is agreeing to the same closing, not to a listing that might sell in three months or nine.
• Out-of-state signing is solved. We send notaries to the heirs. We've closed with heirs in Alabama, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Italy.
• The person living there gets time. Moving out on the day of closing is usually not the deal. We can leave someone in place after we close.

None of this decides who gets what — that's between the heirs and their attorney. It just turns a disagreement about an unknown into a disagreement about a known, which is a far easier one to finish.

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Selling a House in Probate · Inherited a House That Needs Work · Selling a Hoarder House · Open Permits & Violations · Stalled Builds & Unsafe Structures · Spotting a Real Cash Buyer · Inherited a Reverse Mortgage · Behind on an FHA Loan