Selling a House With Back Taxes In Little Havana? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

No will, and a second probate nobody had noticed

A triplex in Little Havana in need of repairs, and three siblings who had come into it when their parents died. There was no will.

Without one, the estate has to go through probate before anybody has the authority to sell. That much they were expecting. What came out of the discovery was that there were two probates to complete, not one.

This is worth explaining, because it catches families constantly. When both parents have died, the first death often went unhandled. Nothing looks wrong at the time — the surviving parent carries on living in the house and life continues. But the first parent’s interest never actually passed anywhere. So when the second parent dies there are two estates sitting on the same property, and both have to be opened before anyone can sign a deed. People find this out at the worst possible moment, which is when they have already decided to sell.

Two probates take longer than one, and a property does not pause while they run. The taxes were falling behind.

So we paid the up-front costs to get the probate started, because nothing moves at all until somebody funds the filing. And we covered the back taxes as they came due through the process rather than only at closing — a long probate with unpaid taxes accruing underneath it is exactly how a family loses the asset they are in the middle of inheriting.

Then we got two of the units rented.

That one needs saying properly, because it is not the usual arrangement. We did not own the building. The probates were still running. But a triplex standing empty through a long probate produces nothing for the people waiting on it while the costs carry on regardless. Two tenanted units meant the family had income during the wait — money coming in to help carry the property and their own bills, instead of a year of outgoings with nothing against them.

None of that was a favour and none of it was clever. It is the difference between a family waiting out two probates with an empty building draining them, and a family waiting out two probates with the building paying for part of it.

Eight units, and a widow left holding all of it

An eight-unit multifamily building, and every problem a building of that age can have arriving at once. Its 40-year recertification was outstanding. There were evictions that needed running. The property taxes were behind. The roof needed work.

And the person left holding all of it was a widow who had not asked for any of it and had no way to deal with it.

That is worth pausing on, because it is a situation people do not picture when they think about apartment buildings. A husband manages a property for years, quietly, and much of how it works lives in his head. He dies. What his wife inherits is not an income — it is a recertification deadline, a tax bill, tenants who have worked out that nobody is watching, and a roof.

Any one of those would be a project. Together they are a full-time job that requires money she did not have and relationships with the city she had never needed before.

We bought it with all of it in place. The recertification, the evictions, the arrears and the roof became ours on the day we closed, rather than a list she had to work through first in order to be allowed to sell.

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