The hidden headaches of buying a dead person’s house

Most people home shop on Zillow. Qendrim Marku checks the obits—which is how he ended up with a house in Winston-Salem, NC, that had been vacant for 12 years.

“Back taxes piled up, the house decayed, neighbors watched it drag down property values,” he recalls. Hoping to help, Marku started sifting through public records.

“I did the genealogy legwork nobody else bothered to do and tracked down the owner’s brother in Nevada, who’d assumed the property was lost to foreclosure,” he says. Marku offered to pay the 12 years of back taxes and take the house off his hands for $60,000. The brother gladly accepted. After pouring $120,000 into renovations, he liked the results so much that he moved in with his wife and baby.

“This house is why I went full-time into real estate,” says Marku, founder of Offer Out Cash Home Buyers. “It showed me there’s a massive opportunity in inherited properties. Most see them as a burden. To me, they’re puzzles.”

The probate problem

More than half of people who inherit a home end up selling it, according to a Trust & Will survey. Steve Gray was one of them. After his mother died, he and his siblings inherited her house, along with a probate process that turned out to be a lot more work than they expected.

“I went in assuming it was paperwork,” Gray says. But “It took about nine months—court filings, deadlines nobody warns you about, and decisions all four of us had to agree on while we were still grieving.”

Gray, a data engineer, believed there had to be a better way. He launched PreListingPro, a platform that helps real estate agents identify inherited homes early by tapping into public probate records. But even when these properties move quickly through the court system, they’re often in such poor condition that even the heirs may not realize the extent of the damage. As Josh Justiniano of California-based Quick Home Offers says, “Heirs often can’t tell you what’s wrong with the property.”

Adding to the problem: Family members often can’t agree on whether to sell, for how much, and more. Melanie Hartmann at Creo Home Buyers in Baltimore recently got a call from an heir whose sister had passed away and bequeathed him the home. The problem? Her grown son was still living there and refused to move out. To resolve the issue, “We provided cash to the son so he could fix his car and find another place.”

Some advice: Pad your rehab budget and your patience levels for a messy, emotional path toward the closing table. “The biggest mistake I see buyers make is treating this like a lead instead of a relationship,” says Gray. “The volume-and-velocity tactics that work on expired listings actively backfire here; you don’t just lose the deal, you get the family telling their agent and their neighbors about it. I was on the receiving end of those calls after my mother died, and I remember exactly how they landed.”