Selling an Inherited House In Liberty City? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Four heirs, a mortgage, and nobody could find out what was owed

A property in Liberty City that had to go through probate, and four heirs who had inherited a mortgage along with it.

They did not know what the balance was. That sounds like an oversight and it is not — it is the ordinary position heirs are put in. A mortgage servicer will not discuss the loan with somebody who has no authority over the estate, and authority is precisely what probate produces. So the people who have become responsible for a debt cannot find out the size of it until a legal process, which takes months, gives them the standing to ask.

Meanwhile the loan does what a loan does when nobody is paying it. Interest carries on. Penalties attach. The number they could not see was getting larger for the whole time they could not see it.

They were not in a position to pay it in any event, or to manage the property properly, and those are two separate problems that tend to arrive together. Four people, one house, one debt of unknown size, and no authority yet to do anything about any of it.

So we paid to get the probate started. Nothing moves before that — not the sale, not the conversation with the lender, not even finding out what the balance is.

Then we negotiated with the lender, and a good deal of the accumulated penalties came off. That is the part which decides what the heirs actually receive. The house is worth what the house is worth. What the four of them walked away with was whatever was left after the debt was satisfied — so every dollar of penalty taken off that side of the ledger was a dollar that went to them instead.

Which is the thing worth understanding about an inherited mortgage. The sale price gets all of the attention, and the payoff figure is quietly doing just as much work. A buyer who treats the payoff as a fixed number and a buyer who goes and argues about it produce two different outcomes for a family — on the same house, at the same price.

Twenty-four units, and violations for work he says he never did

A twenty-four unit multifamily building on the Liberty City side of the Brownsville line, inherited, and three years behind on taxes. The taxes alone run thirty thousand dollars a year, so three years of them is not a small number. There was no insurance on the building at all.

It was largely abandoned and in bad condition. People were in the empty units who were not tenants — using them for drugs and for sex work — and there were dogs loose in the building. It was a dangerous place. Dangerous for anybody going near it, and dangerous for the people inside it, which is the half that usually gets left out.

The owner was living in one of the units. He was also doing the repairs himself, and that is where the real trouble started, because he was not a contractor. The work was mismatched and none of it was done well.

Then the citations began. This is the part worth reading twice: he told us the city was citing him for work he had not done, and he could not prove it either way. That is what unpermitted work actually costs, and it is not the fine. When work goes in without permits there is no record of what you did or when you did it — which means there is no record of what you did not do either. Every defect in the building becomes arguably yours, and you have nothing to point at.

Meanwhile: thirty thousand a year in taxes with three years outstanding, no insurance, twenty-four units mostly producing nothing, and a citation file getting longer. There is no version of that a man works his way out of from inside one of the units.

He sold it to us. We are still rebuilding it, which is the honest answer on this one. A twenty-four unit building in that condition does not finish quickly, and it would be a lie to write it up as though it already had.