Selling an inherited house in California: what actually has to happen first

Inheriting a house is the most common reason people call us, and it is also the situation where the most bad information circulates. Someone tells you probate takes two years. Someone else tells you that you cannot touch the house until it closes. A third person mentions that your property taxes are about to triple, which — depending on what you do next — may be the only accurate thing you have been told.

Here is the actual sequence.

First question: is there a trust?

This is the fork in the road, and everything downstream depends on it.

If the house was held in a living trust, there is no probate. The successor trustee named in the trust document has authority to sell as soon as they have recorded an affidavit of death of trustee and a certification of trust with the county. That can be done in a couple of weeks. Most people in this position are surprised by how straightforward it is.

If the house was held in joint tenancy — or as community property with right of survivorship between spouses — it passes to the survivor automatically. An affidavit of death of joint tenant, recorded with the county along with a certified death certificate, clears the title. Again, no probate.

If the house was in the deceased person’s name alone, with no trust, you are looking at probate or one of the simplified alternatives below.

Check before you assume. We have talked to more than one person who spent months bracing for probate on a house that turned out to be sitting in a trust their parent set up in 1998 and never mentioned.

The simplified routes

California does not force every estate through full probate.

For smaller estates there is a petition to determine succession to real property, which is a single court filing rather than a full administration. The dollar thresholds are adjusted periodically, and the state raised them substantially in 2025 — a decedent’s primary residence up to a much higher value can now go through the simplified petition than could a few years ago. If someone told you the limit was around $184,000, that figure is out of date. Ask a probate attorney what the current threshold is before you assume you are stuck with the long route; the difference is months.

There is also a spousal property petition, which is faster still where a surviving spouse is inheriting.

If it is full probate

Expect roughly nine to eighteen months in most Bay Area and Central Valley counties, sometimes longer where the court calendar is backed up. The important detail for selling is what authority the personal representative has.

Under the Independent Administration of Estates Act, a personal representative granted full authority can sell the house with a notice of proposed action to the beneficiaries — no court hearing, no confirmation. That is a normal sale on a normal timeline.

With limited authority, the sale has to be confirmed by the court. That means a hearing, and at that hearing the sale is open to overbidding in the courtroom. The first overbid has to exceed your accepted price by a set formula, and from there it is an auction. Buyers know this, which is why many will not make an offer on a court-confirmation sale at all — they do not want to spend money on inspections for a deal a stranger can take from them on the courthouse steps.

If you are the personal representative, find out which authority you were granted. It changes what kind of buyer will engage with you.

The property tax problem: Proposition 19

This is the part that catches people, and it is worth understanding before you decide whether to keep the house.

Before 2021, a child inheriting a parent’s property kept the parent’s assessed value. A house bought in 1979 carried a 1979 tax basis, and that basis passed down. It is why so many long-held Bay Area homes have property tax bills that look like typing errors.

Proposition 19 ended that for most cases. Since February 2021, the parent-to-child exclusion from reassessment applies only if the child makes the house their own principal residence and files for the homeowners’ exemption within a year of the transfer. Even then the protection is capped — above roughly a million dollars over the old assessed value, the excess gets reassessed.

The practical consequence: if you inherit a house and rent it out, or leave it empty, it is reassessed to current market value. A house in Concord or San Leandro that has been carrying a $2,400 annual tax bill can jump to $12,000 or more. That is a thousand dollars a month in new carrying cost on a property that may not be generating anything, and it starts whether or not probate has finished.

We meet a lot of people who intended to hold an inherited house, discovered the new tax bill six months in, and changed their minds. Better to run that number at the start.

The one piece of good news: stepped-up basis

Federal tax law resets the cost basis of inherited property to its fair market value on the date of death. If the house was bought for $60,000 in 1978 and is worth $700,000 the day your parent dies, your basis is $700,000. Sell it near that value and there is little or no capital gains tax, even though the property appreciated enormously over four decades.

This is why selling soon after inheriting is often more tax-efficient than holding for years and selling later. Talk to a CPA about your own situation, but the general shape holds.

What we actually see

The typical inherited property we look at has been empty for six to eighteen months. Nobody has been maintaining it. There is a lifetime of belongings inside that no one has had the heart or the time to deal with. Two or three siblings own it jointly and live in different states, and they do not entirely agree about what to do. The house needs a roof.

None of that has to be sorted out before you talk to a buyer. We buy houses with the contents still in them and clear them ourselves — you take what you want and leave everything else where it sits. We can work with a personal representative during probate and close when the court allows. And if the siblings need a number in writing to have a sensible conversation, we will put one together for that purpose alone, with no expectation that anything follows from it.

What to sort out before you sell

1. Find out how the house was held. Trust, joint tenancy, or sole name. This determines everything.
2. Get a date-of-death value. You need it for the tax basis and it anchors every later conversation.
3. Check the insurance. Most homeowner policies lapse or drastically reduce coverage on a vacant property, often after 30 or 60 days. An uninsured empty house is a genuine risk, and vacant-property cover is expensive but far cheaper than the alternative.
4. Keep the utilities on if you can. Water damage found in month nine costs far more than nine months of a minimum water bill.
5. Agree among the heirs what “done” looks like before you start getting numbers. Most stalled estate sales we see stalled over a disagreement, not over price.

None of this is legal or tax advice, and estates differ enough that the details matter. Talk to a probate attorney and a CPA. But if you want a straight number on the house so you know what you are actually deciding between, that part we can do — and it costs you nothing to find out.