Selling Deceased Parent's Home

Chris Freitag moving furniture to a trash bin as he cleared out a home in Ridgefield whose owner had died.

After Dwight Trainor's mother died unexpectedly earlier this year, he and his sister decided to sell her Leonia home, which had been in his family since the 1930s. But first, they had to clean it out — a task that took seven days of their time, plus the services of an estate sale company and a junk-removal team.

"There was four generations' worth of stuff squeezed into every corner," said Trainor, a geologist who lives in Texas.

As Trainor discovered, selling a home after a death isn't like other real estate transactions. Not only are the homes often overstuffed with decades' worth of belongings; they're also often poorly maintained.

In addition, heirs sometimes disagree over pricing and marketing the house. And sellers are not only dealing with the house sale, they're mourning their loss and figuring out how to handle an estate — often while living in another part of the country, as in Trainor's case.

"There's an emotional component to this," said Wendy Dessanti, a Weichert agent in Tenafly. "People can be going through a hard time. They miss their parent, and they have to be making smart decisions. Sometimes it takes people a long time to deal with."

Nonetheless, John Kopp, an attorney in Clifton, said that it's a good idea to sell as quickly as possible.

"Acting on an estate property sooner rather than later is always better, because you have carrying charges," said Kopp, who has been dealing with the home sales of his recently deceased mother and mother-in-law. Property taxes and maintenance costs add up, and if a property is empty, the owners have to pay for special vacant-home insurance.

To move the process along, Kopp said, heirs can start doing the preliminary work toward a sale — such as interviewing real estate agents and making repairs — while they're waiting for the will to be probated and the executor to be officially named. And Dessanti recommends that heirs work with a lawyer familiar with both estate and real estate law, if possible.

Because elderly homeowners can't always keep up with maintenance, heirs often find headaches like faulty plumbing and heating, ratty carpets and obsolete septic systems. In the case of Trainor's family home, for example, a contract to sell the house fell apart when an inspection turned up a leaking underground oil tank, which had to be remediated.

And even houses that are in decent repair are often filled with a lifetime's worth of stuff.

"They've been in the homes 40 or 50 years, and they've hung on to things," said Barbara Ostroth, a Coldwell Banker agent in Oradell.

Agents say clearing out the house is usually a multistage process. First, families need to find and remove the important papers, heirlooms and expensive items — a process than can take days. Then, a tag-sale or auction company can be called in to sell anything that has any value, for fees that average around 25 to 30 percent of the sale amount. Items not sold can then be donated to charity. Finally, a cleanout company can haul away what's left, at a cost of roughly $600 to $1,800, depending on the size and contents of the house.

All in all, it's much tougher than a typical move, in part because it takes time to figure out who should get what, said Emilia Freitag, an agent with Rand Realty Better Homes and Gardens in Ridgefield.

Often, the late parent's treasures have little worth, because tastes have changed.

"Collections of Hummels — you can't give them away," Kopp said, referring to the series of porcelain figurines.

Joanne Randazzo of Brick said clearing out her father's belongings was the hardest part of selling his New Milford split-level after his death at age 92 in 2011. He had lived in the home for almost half a century, and it was full of souvenirs from his frequent travels, as well as books, records, a stamp collection and more.

She didn't want any of the furniture, but she couldn't interest charities or a dealer. "I was panicking," she said. "I didn't want to put it on the street." In the end, a family friend who had just bought a second home took the furniture.

But no one wanted the Ellery Queen books and the encyclopedias, which went to the recycling center. And the stamp collection is sitting in her daughter's dining room in plastic bins. "That was so precious to him, but she's not interested in stamps, and neither am I," Randazzo said. "It doesn't mean anything to anybody else — that's sad."

Another complicating factor in estate sales is that there are often a number of heirs.

"When there are four, five or six people involved — typically siblings — with an interest in the estate, it turns into four, five and six different opinions as to what the price should be, how much should a price reduction be if necessary, what price should we accept, what should we give on a home inspection and what attorney should we use," said Rick Bandazian, a Coldwell Banker agent in Upper Saddle River.

"Each has their own idea of value. I've seen four siblings turn down an offer because they wanted $10,000 more," said Terri Golden, a Coldwell Banker agent in Fort Lee. "That's $2,500 per person. In the end, they sold for less and had to pay taxes and maintain the property for longer than necessary."

Ostroth told of a family where the adult children — all living out of state — didn't trust each other to clean out the house unless they were all there to see what everyone took. It took over a year to get the property ready for sale.

Some of the family conflict can be avoided if the executor keeps the other heirs informed.

"The executor should be transparent in their dealings with the property," Kopp said. "Every effort should be made to include the beneficiaries in the process."

Heirs living out of state often lean heavily on real estate agents, asking the agents to check on the house and hire auction and cleanout companies, as well as painters and contractors, to get the house ready for sale.

Lisa Tannenbaum, a Coldwell Banker agent in Allendale, recently worked with out-of-state heirs when she sold an estate house in Oakland. She couldn't find any local charities to take all the furniture, but she did find a charity from the South that took it. She also helped the out-of-state heirs find a contractor to upgrade the cesspool to a modern septic system.

"There's a lot of hand-holding on estate sales," said Chuck Martini of Friedberg Properties in Tenafly.

Agents say it's not necessary to spend a lot of money on major renovations — such as a new kitchen — when selling an estate property. But most say it's crucial to brighten up the space by clearing clutter, having the house and windows professionally cleaned, painting the walls and removing old carpet, especially if there are hardwood floors underneath.

Tannenbaum said she got a good price — more than $300,000 — for the Oakland property, a two-bedroom ranch, because all the interiors were repainted and the floors refinished.

"Whether it's an $800,000 house or a $300,000 house, buyers tend to not want to do a lot of work," she said. "Sprucing up really brought in the money."

Reposted from:  http://www.northjersey.com/real-estate/selling-a-home-when-a-parent-dies-1.671483?page=all