Is Your Property in Your Name?

Beth:
Is your property in your name?

Hi. I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land, and that’s one of the first questions that we’ll ask somebody who’s ready to sell their vacant land when they tell us that their land is inherited. What exactly does that mean when we ask if the property is in your name?

Oftentimes when we talk to the land seller, they’ll tell us, “Well, yeah, the property is in my name. I get a tax bill every year from the tax assessor and I pay it. I’ve been paying my property taxes for 10 plus years.”

Have you ever heard the saying that the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes? The tax collector is always going to find someone to tax. Just because your name is on the tax bill and you have been paying it, doesn’t necessarily mean that the property is in your name. They just happen to have your name and can squeeze taxes out of you.

When we ask you the question, “is the property in your name?”, we are asking whether your name is on the deed to the property. There are a couple of different scenarios that might take place when it comes to inherited property. One, somebody may have passed away and left you the property in their will. If that’s the case, we’re going to ask you the question: was the will probated or not? There are different scenarios in which we can move forward, whether it is probated or not, and we’ll ask you a series of questions regarding that.

Another scenario is where the property was passed down but it was never deeded to you, or never deeded through the generations. For example, let’s say this is your grandmother’s property and it’s understood that it was passed to maybe your mother. In that example, the next couple questions we’re going to ask you are: “how do you know it was left to your mother? Did your mother have any siblings? Was your mother married to somebody else? How many children did your mother have? Why do you get the property versus your siblings?”

Here at TB Properties, we only close through a title company, and so if this is inherited property and the deed is not in your name there may be some title work that needs to be done in order to clear the chain of title for you to sell it through the proper channels to us.

That’s the great thing about working with a title company. Oftentimes they’ve got an attorney that can clear the chain of title. Now sometimes that might require affidavits that need to be completed. Perhaps someone who’s known the family will have to fill out paperwork saying that they know whoever owned the property and they knew that they would have left it to certain family members and they knew who the family members were. It tends to be pretty simple, but you do need to know all the different heirs, and the title company will come up with that.

To reiterate, when we ask the question, “is the property in your name?”, what we’re asking is truly: is the deed to the property in your name? Was the property deeded to you? Hopefully that answers that question. Please understand that there may be some remedies if the deed to the property is not in your name, and we’re happy to help with that.

Again, here at TB Properties Buys Land, we are real estate investors. We purchase rural vacant land using cash and we close through title companies for the safety of you as the land seller as well as us as the buyer. But if you have any questions, please reach out to us. We look forward to working with you. Thanks again.