Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. Today I thought I would discuss a case study involving inherited property. Now a lot of people come to us with inherited land and sometimes this is inherited through the generations, it’s passed down. Sometimes this is when a spouse or a family member sadly passes away. So this example is from a lovely couple in Johnson County, Arkansas. So they had land in Arkansas and she had been paying on it for many, many years and so she thought it would be easy enough to sell the property. But unfortunately, there were probated wills that she thought the real estate attorney had filed in Johnson County, Arkansas, but in fact, had not been done. So there was considerable title cleanup that needed to be done in order for her to sell the property. So just because her name was on the tax assessor’s paperwork and she’d been paying on that property, the property taxes for many years, her name was not on the chain of title in order to sell that property.
So a title office attorney at the title company had to clean that up. So the probated wills had to be filed with the county. She found out that the property had actually been left to not just her, but multiple family members. So they had to be contacted and they had to sign off on their paperwork, not only on the purchase contract, but also on the closing documents. And they had to agree to the price and all these fun things. Now, why am I explaining all this to you? Well sometimes, like to her, this seemed really simple. It had been probated, they had a real estate attorney many years ago, and still it hadn’t been done correctly. She is not the first person we’ve run across who thought this was filed in the county, they thought the real estate attorney had cleaned it up, and done everything properly. So not the first person and probably won’t be the last person.
So why I’m bringing this up is it can be very expensive to have to hire a new real estate attorney to get this done or to go through the title company and have this done. It can cost thousands and thousands of dollars, depending on how complicated this is and it can take a long time to get this taken care of. And this has to be done before you can put that on the market if you’re working with the realtor. So this couple had contacted us and we promised to pay all closing costs through this whole process. We promised to walk them through it. They did not understand what needed to be done. It was very complicated. There was affidavits of heirship that needed to be filed and contracts that needed to be taken care of, and we were able to facilitate that and make that easy for them.
They were able to get a single goal price. They didn’t have to worry about title fees coming out of that. They knew exactly what they were going to bring home as soon as the transaction closed. Took a little bit longer, it did take a little bit longer to get everything done, but it did happen. They got the price that was on the contract and it was easy for them. So if you’ve got inherited land, if it’s been passed on to you, if there was a probated will, if there was not, please contact us. We can let you know if this process can happen and work for you just like it did for this couple in Johnson County in Arkansas or if not, we’ll let you know what needs to be done. But we look forward to hearing from you. Reach out across our website, send us an email, service@TBpropertiesbuysland.com, or give us a call. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.