Beth:
Hi, I am Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. Today, I’m going to discuss undivided interest. The reason for addressing the topic of undivided interest is that we’ve had a number of people who’ve called in or emailed us, ready to sell their property for cash and ready to do it quickly, looking for the convenience of working with us and the safety of closing through title with TB Properties Buys Land. However, when we take a look at their legal description, we see the letters UND or UNDIV indicating that they only have what is called an undivided interest in the property.
What does that mean? This is not legal advice or legal information. However, undivided interest means that you don’t own the entire property outright; you do not have 100% stake in the property. It means that other interest holders also share an ownership of the property in an undivided way. In other words, since it is not divided, you could not claim (for example) the northwest quarter of the property. To continue the example, if there were 4 of you and you each own 25% of the property, all four of you have a stake in the entire property but not in a particular part of that property. This means that if you want to sell the property, all four of you have to agree to selling it and you each have to sign off on it.
This is particularly troublesome if you don’t know who the other interest holders are. This typically happens with inherited properties where there was no will that was put in place and it was passed down by word of mouth over generations. Perhaps it was a great-great-grandmother and they left it to all their children and it keeps getting passed down. Even if your family has been paying property taxes on it for generations, that does not generally make any difference in the ownership of the property itself. With that said, each state is different and their laws regarding undivided interest and inherited property can be very different. Some states, such as Texas, are a bit more protective of property owners, which may make it substantially harder for you to sell the property if there’s undivided interest.
Truly, a good real estate attorney can really help you through that. At TB Properties Buys Land, we do not buy an “interest” in property but will buy the entire property and we have been able to buy confusing inherited property on a number of occasions. In some cases, under the guidance of a title company, we have been able to use legal forms, such as an affidavit of heirship to clear the chain of title. In some other cases, they have been so complicated and too unclear for us to move forward. I had a gentleman who wanted to sell his 100+ acres, and he’d been paying property taxes on it for almost 10 years, but there were over 100 heirs. He didn’t know who they were, and it got down to where we just didn’t know how to proceed without being able to identify every single living heir. There was no inexpensive way of being able to move forward in buying his property.
What I’m trying to convey to you is if your legal description says undivided interest, be aware you do not own the entire property but you may try to find out who are the other interest holders. Are they other family members? How might this have occurred? If there are only a few of you, we might be able to track down those other interest holders and be able to jointly sell the property. I cannot speak for other investment firms, but as I mentioned before, TB Properties Buys Land will not buy a percentage of the property or an interest in a property. We want to buy the whole property.
If you can help us by identifying the other people who might have an ownership stake, that could help. Sometimes, we can see this through the county records and sometimes we can’t. Sometimes, we can jointly work with you on this. But if you see that UND or UNDIV in your legal description on your county assesssor’s tax record, that’s one of those red flags for you to start tracking down who might be the other interest holders in your property. Hopefully, that explains a few things. If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
TB Properties Buys Land is an investment firm that purchases vacant land. We buy land all over the United States for cash. Our clients feel safe working with us since we only close through reputable title companies for your safety and security, and we try to close quickly.
I have heard from some of our recent clients that there have been some concerns where people will work with a real estate investment firm and they end up trying to sell your property before they buy it from the landowner and if it does not sell, they do not buy the property. We do not do that; TB Properties Buys Land buys your property from you outright with a firm closing date. We do not list your property while we are awaiting closing and we do not push out the closing date out. Our clients turn to us because they can count on us to buy their property from them quickly, easily and securing and that you can count on.