Real Estate Agent · Scranton, PA · Member since 2022 · 13 posts · 7 votes
Hello all,
To give a brief backstory- My cousins aunt had just passed away (a few months ago) and she lived in a house with her husband who was the owner, he had passed away about 20 years ago but never created an estate and never had any children. It was presumed ownership was passed to his wife who had lived there but when boiled down legally, his siblings and their heirs are also entitled to a fraction. So my cousin is now executor of the estate of his aunt but only owns 1/8, all of the other 7/8 owners are deceased as well as some of their children. So there are now 20+ people to connect with in order to get a clean marketable title, (none of these existing family members have any idea of the property even existing). So I contacted an attorney who said we can do a quiet title but since there are so many people geographically displaced I'd have to post about it in the national newspaper and all in all the cost would be roughly $40,000 just to get marketable title. I can however purchase the house cash for $30,000 without having any title work but of course take the risk on of someone potentially claiming their stake (the odds of this seem very low). I'd appreciate any advice, thanks in advance.
2. Are you dealing with a real estate lawyer? It makes no sense to me that you would need to advertise nationally. The whole idea of a quiet title is to give people public notice, you never really know if they are local or not. If you knew where they were you could just deal with them directly in many cases. I have never heard of the need to advertise like that.
A quiet title action should be maybe $1500-2500. Something like that.
3. If you purchase the house cash without handling these issues then you will have the same issue to deal with later when you want to refinance or sell and title insurance is needed.
4. The $40k number may have to do with something else! It could have to do with estate taxes that need to be paid.
When someone dies the state taxes what is inherited. If that isn't paid, it is a defacto lien on the property.
So, potentially 2 sets of taxes need to be paid. Once from when the husband died 20 years ago and a 2nd set of estate taxes when the wife died more recently. Since time has passed the tax would be based on the assessed value. Of course establishing what the assessed value was 20 years ago is less obvious. So, this is why your lawyer may have estimated high. Also, I think this can be negotiated with the state as well and potentially reduced.