Dealing with probate issues in an estate sale (Chicago)

[Alan Gomez]

Hello Forum, Well it seems I find myself in a situation. I have a contract for my first fix n flip up in the air. I have saved around 100k and have the house locked in for 57 with about 25 in repairs and an arv of about 145k. In late February we had the contract and the second week of March we had the closing. At the closing table we were just getting ready to finalize the deal and we came across a bit of a let down. The sale was an estate sale, the parents died in 1978 and left the house to their 10 children. The head of the estate had to fight in court at the time because of a dispute among the siblings at that time. He was granted to be the head of the estate however in fine print the title company saw that it was "supervised" meaning a judge has to approve of him selling the house since they have to make sure all beneficiaries get their equal share of the money. So the closing wasn't able to be done. The attorney the sellers for the sale is not the same attorney they used back in 78 so it took like two weeks to send him a letter to be able to release the case to the new lawyer ( this is my understanding from what I was told). Since then we are now two months from that original closing date and the sellers lawyer is "working on it". They offered an articles of agreement where we pay 500$ a month and its reduced from the final amount when we finally close for deed. However, I'm not sure if that's a wise decision considering that I'm paying the taxes and on top of that if I start working on it and I invest all this money I could end up not getting the deed. Or I could be stuck waiting for them to deal with this and keep paying holding costs since I can't sell the property until this issue is resolved. I would be at the mercy of the sellers lawyer and the slow court system. I'm new to this so I just want to know what my fellow bigger pockets investors advise? Thank you in advanced.