Selling a House in Probate In Miami-Dade? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Five siblings, and nobody who could buy out the other four

Coral Gables

Five siblings inherited a house in Coral Gables. A good house on a tree lined street, with great bones — on paper not a problem at all.

Except that five people owned it and none of them could buy out the other four. That is the arithmetic that stops most inherited houses, and it is not a shortage of goodwill. Buying out four siblings means finding four fifths of a Coral Gables house, in cash or in financing. Very few people can do that, and the ones who can usually have somewhere else they would rather put it.

They were also not in one place. Three were out of state. One was in Tampa. One was here in Miami with her children. So every decision needed five people in four places, several of whom had not agreed about what to do with the house from the beginning.

Coral Gables taxes are high, and they do not pause while a family works out what it wants. There were back taxes.

And there were code violations that none of them knew about. The city had cited the property because the grass and the bushes were not being kept. That sounds like the smallest problem available and it is precisely the sort that compounds. Nobody local was looking at the house. Notices went to an address none of them lived at. A citation nobody answers does not go quiet, it accrues, and by the time anyone finds out it is not a question of cutting the grass any more — it is a record against the property that has to be cleared before the house can be sold cleanly.

We bought it and cleared all of it. The violations, the back taxes, the whole record. Then the renovation, and the house went back to being what that street would expect of it.

Five people who could not agree about a house ended up not having to agree on anything except selling it. That is usually the one decision a group that size can actually reach, and reaching it is what stopped the taxes and the citations from deciding it for them.

The abandoned house next door, and three heirs out of state

West Little River

We were finishing a four bedroom house in West Little River when the property next door started to look like nobody was coming back to it. Abandoned houses are not subtle, and you notice them faster when you are on the same street every day.

So we went looking for who owned it, and were passed along until we reached the executor of the estate. There were three heirs. All of them lived out of state.

That is the ordinary shape of an inherited house that ends up empty, and it is worth saying that nobody in it was being careless. They were simply not in Florida. You cannot look at a house from another state. You cannot walk through it, cannot let a contractor in and stand there while he tells you what he thinks, cannot tell whether the last person to leave locked the door. And a house nobody is watching does not hold still. It gets worse every month, and the people on the street see it long before the owners do.

It was a two bedroom on a decent sized lot, and it needed absolutely everything. Nothing partial about it.

The number reflected that, because it has to. A house that needs everything is not the same asset as a house that needs work, and an offer that pretends otherwise comes apart later at somebody's expense.

The estate closed and all three heirs were paid. From where they were sitting that was the entire point — a property in Miami that had been doing nothing but decline became money that actually reached them, without any of them having to manage a construction job in a city they did not live in.

We knew that street and we knew what the house needed, because we were standing on it every day finishing the one beside it. That is not usually how a seller finds a buyer. It is how it happened here.

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

Liberty City

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.

Probate moves slowly, and neither the taxes nor the lender were waiting

Allapattah

An inherited duplex in Allapattah, with more or less everything happening at once. It had to go through probate. It was two years behind on taxes. And it was going into foreclosure, because what had been inherited was the house and the mortgage together.

Those things do not queue politely. Probate is the slow one, and it is also the one that has to come first, because until an estate is open there is nobody with the authority to sell anything. So the heirs were in a position where the answer to the taxes and the answer to the foreclosure was to sell the property — and they could not sell the property yet.

The duplex was tenanted. The tenants were good people and they were paying well below market rent, which is a fact about the building rather than about them. What it meant in practice was that the property was not producing enough to service the mortgage, let alone catch up two years of taxes on top.

Nobody inherits that combination equipped for it. Any one of probate, tax arrears or a foreclosure is a project on its own. Arriving together, with a hard deadline on two of the three, they are a full-time job that costs money well before it produces any.

So there were three things to do, and all of them had to happen before we owned anything. We paid the probate attorneys to get the file started, because the estate had to be open before anything else could move at all. We paid the two years of back taxes, so the house could not be lost on the tax side while the probate side was still grinding. And we sent our purchase agreement to the lender.

That last one is the least obvious and worth explaining. A lender in a foreclosure is not trying to take a house — it is trying to be repaid. A signed contract tells them the money is coming and roughly when, and that is a completely different conversation from silence. Silence is what most of these files have in them.

None of that is dramatic. It is three things paid for and set moving in the right order, before closing, on a property we did not own yet. It is also the difference between an estate that sells a duplex and an estate that loses one.

Six heirs, eight months, and then a second probate

Buena Vista

This estate had six heirs. Getting six people to agree on something, sign it, and send it back took eight months on its own — and nobody involved was being difficult. That is simply how long it takes when a family is spread across several states and everyone has a life running alongside it.

Then, partway through, one of the heirs died.

His share now had to pass to his own children, who lived in Alabama, which meant opening a second probate there before anybody could close on a house in Miami. Estates collapse at moments like that. Meanwhile the property taxes were going unpaid, and the family were at real risk of losing the house altogether over an amount that was small next to what it was worth.

So we paid the probate attorney's fees up front, and we paid the back taxes, which stopped the clock running against the family while the second probate went through. Our attorney ran the case. We sent notaries out to the heirs wherever they happened to live, so that nobody had to travel to Miami to sign anything.

And it closed.

Most buyers price probate risk by simply refusing to carry it — call us when it is finished, they say, which can mean a year of waiting. The eight months was never a reason to walk away from this one. The eight months was the work.

No will, and a second probate nobody had noticed

Little Havana

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.