Somebody at a title company told you the house cannot be sold. What they usually meant is that an inherited house with a lien on it cannot be sold the normal way, by a normal buyer, with a normal loan. That is a different sentence.
I’m Raul Bolufe. My company buys the share of an inherited house that belongs to one heir, across Texas and Florida. I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is what we do.
We buy an inherited house with a lien on it regularly. The lien is usually the reason the deal exists.
The liens we run into
An inherited house with a lien almost never has just one. And they fall into two groups that behave completely differently, which is the part nobody explains to families.
The ones that negotiate.
- Child support liens against one of the heirs, sometimes from thirty years ago
- Judgment liens from a credit card or a medical bill, attached to whichever heir got sued
- HOA assessments and violation letters stacking up on a vacant house
- Demolition orders and code enforcement from the city
The ones that do not.
- IRS liens
- Delinquent property taxes
I want to be straight about that second group, because I have heard other buyers imply otherwise. An IRS lien does not come down because you asked politely. Property taxes do not either. The balance is the balance. What can sometimes be arranged is how it gets paid, a down payment and a plan instead of the whole thing at once, but the number itself does not shrink. On those we either pay it or we build it into the deal, and either way it comes out of what the deal can carry. That is not us being cheap. That is arithmetic.
There are also mortgages and reverse mortgages still sitting in a dead person’s name, which are their own animal.
The one families never see coming is the heir lien. A judgment against your brother does not attach to the house. It attaches to your brother’s piece of the house. That is why we run a lien search on every single heir, not just the property. Deals die when nobody does that.
What actually happens to the lien
This is the part worth reading twice.
When you sell us your share of an inherited house with a lien on it, the lien does not follow you. It stays with the property, and we become the owner who deals with it. We make the calls. We negotiate the ones that negotiate. We pay the ones that do not. You are not on any of those calls and you do not fund any of it.
Liens are a normal Tuesday for my team. There is no dramatic opening. I call and I say I see you have a lien on this property, we are trying to get it cleared up, and I want to find out what can be done. Most of the time the person on the other end has been waiting years for somebody to ask.
And they come down more than people think. On a house in West Columbia we settled a six figure lien for under five percent of its face value, and got a demolition order lifted on the same property. On a mobile home in Willis we took a child support lien from around twenty five thousand down to about four. On another Texas deal a thirty six thousand dollar child support lien settled at five. In Killeen we took on a teardown that the city had already ordered demolished.
I am not promising your lien settles at five percent. Some do not move at all. But the number on that letter is an opening position, and most families have never been told that.
Why a lien makes your share harder to sell elsewhere
A regular buyer needs a loan. A loan needs title insurance. Title insurance needs a clean chain and no surprises. An inherited house with a lien fails that test before anyone even gets to the part about four heirs and no probate.
So the house sits. Agents pass. The one cash offer the family got was from somebody who ghosted after seeing the title report.
We are not underwriting a loan. We are buying a fractional interest and taking the problems with it, which is a different business.
What we need from you
Very little, honestly.
Tell us the address and who died. We pull the title work, which is where most of these liens surface for the first time. We run every heir. We build the affidavit of heirship so the sale can happen without probate. We send a mobile notary to you. You sign. We record. You get paid after recording.
You do not clear the lien first. You do not pay the back taxes first. You do not clean out the house or fix anything. If you could have done those things, you would not be reading this page.
What you get for your share is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the size of the deal, the property, the condition, and how complicated the family is. A heavy lien load does affect the number, and I would rather say that plainly than surprise you later.
What this means for you
- An inherited house with a lien is still sellable. It is just not sellable the conventional way.
- Child support, judgments, HOA and code violations negotiate. IRS liens and property taxes do not.
- Liens against one heir attach to that heir’s share, not the whole property.
- Every heir gets a lien search, because that is where deals blow up.
- Once we own a piece, the negotiating and the paying are ours.
- Six figure liens have settled for a fraction. Not always. Often enough to ask.
- You do not clear anything before selling.
The short version
- We buy an inherited house with a lien, including child support, judgments, IRS, taxes, demolition and HOA.
- The lien stays with the property and becomes our problem after closing.
- Some liens negotiate hard. IRS and property taxes do not, and we say so instead of pretending.
- You pay nothing and fix nothing.
If a lien is what stopped your family from selling, call or text me at 936-380-6384, or fill out the form. Tell me the address, who passed away, and what the letter says if you still have it.