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

Still in the same house, with the taxes into a second year

A divorce in West Little River that had been running about eighteen months, with a house in the middle of it that neither of them could resolve. Household income had dropped as well — one of them was out of work and finding it hard to get back in.

The eighteen months is the part worth sitting with. That is not a long time to take over a decision of that size. But property taxes do not know a divorce is happening. They went unpaid into a second year. Then the letters started arriving from the mortgage company, and after the letters came the foreclosure.

So two separate processes were closing on the same house from different directions, and they do not coordinate with each other. The lender’s clock is the foreclosure. The county’s clock is the tax deed sale. Either one can take a house, and being partway through dealing with one does nothing whatsoever to slow the other.

Listing it was not really available to them. The house needed the updates they had planned on doing when they first bought it and never got to — and a sale with a realtor and professional photographs means doing that work first. That is money they did not have, on a house they were losing, in the middle of a divorce. They also wanted it handled discreetly, which a listing does not do.

And they were both still living in the house through all of it. Not comfortably. Just both still there, because that is where they were until it sold.

Two things had to happen. We negotiated the payoff with the lender, and that conversation brought a good deal of the accumulated fees down. That matters more than it sounds — in a foreclosure the fees are the part that quietly eats whatever equity is left, and nobody sends you a statement showing you how much of your own money is going that way. Then we paid the back taxes, which took the tax deed off the board completely.

What was left after that was equity. Actual money, to two people who had been on course to lose the house to a tax deed sale and walk away from it with nothing at all.

That is the whole of the difference in a situation like this, and it is not really about what the house is worth. A property with two years of unpaid taxes and a foreclosure running has a value, and a set of costs eating that value every month. How much of it survives is decided by how quickly somebody stops the costs. The version where nobody does ends the same way — the house sold regardless, just by the county, and the equity gone.