A house sits in Harris County with the lights off. The deed still says the name of a woman who died in 2014. Her four children each own a piece of it, none of them have ever signed anything, and the tax bill goes to an address nobody lives at. That is texas heir property.

I’m Raul Bolufe. My company buys one thing, the share of an inherited house that belongs to one heir, across Texas and Florida. I have been in real estate since 2013 and closed more than 800 deals. This particular corner of it, buying one heir’s piece of a house nobody can sell, is where I have spent the last few years, and we have paid out more than 100 individual heirs doing it.

I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is what happens on the deals we close every week.

If you are reading this, you probably own a piece of one.

When families call me the first three things out of their mouth are almost always the same. Who are you. What do you do. How did you get my information. Fair questions, so the rest of this page answers them.

What texas heir property actually means

When someone dies without a will and nobody opens probate, the house does not go to the county and it does not go to whoever is living in it. It goes to the family, split into pieces, automatically. That is texas heir property.

You do not own a room. You own a percentage of the whole thing. Your brother owns a percentage. Your cousin in Dallas who has not called since the funeral owns a percentage too, and he probably has no idea.

Nobody records anything, so nothing looks different on paper. The deed keeps the dead person’s name on it for ten or twenty years. Then somebody tries to sell, or a tax suit lands, and the whole family finds out at once that they have been co-owners this whole time.

Why it gets stuck

Every piece of texas heir property I have ever bought was stuck for one of these reasons.

• One heir lives in the house, pays nothing, and will not leave.
• One heir cannot be found. The last address anyone has is from 2011.
• The family has been arguing since the service and nobody will be the first to move.
• Back taxes piled up and the county filed suit.
• Somebody was told they needed probate, got a quote for a few thousand dollars, and did not have it.
• Everyone believes the whole family has to agree before anything can happen.

That last one is the big one, and it is wrong. You can sell your own share by yourself. You cannot sell the whole house alone, but your piece is yours, and it can go by deed with one signature and one notary. That single fact breaks most of these loose.

What we do with it

We buy one heir’s share. Not the house. Your piece.

The process is short on purpose. We pull the title work and find out who actually inherited, which is often not who the family thinks. We collect death certificates. We put together an affidavit of heirship, which needs one family member to swear to it plus two witnesses who are far enough from the family that they gain nothing from the sale. A mobile notary comes to you, wherever you are. We record the deed. You get paid after it records.

What you get for a 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. I will not pretend it is retail. You are selling a fraction of a house you cannot sell on your own, and that is what a fraction is worth.

Once we own a piece, the liens become our problem. Back taxes, child support liens, judgments, demolition orders, code violations, HOA letters. We call, we negotiate, we pay. On a house in West Columbia we settled a six figure lien for under five percent of its face and got a demolition order lifted. On a mobile home in Willis we took a child support lien from around twenty five thousand down to about four. You do not pay for any of that and you do not sit in any of those phone calls.

Where we actually work in Texas

We are not a national brand with a call center. These are counties where we have closed real deals and know the clerks, the appraisal districts and the tax attorneys.

• Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Liberty and San Jacinto around Houston
• Ector out in Odessa and the Permian
• Bell and Taylor in Central Texas
• Johnson south of Fort Worth

Honestly, Texas has been good to work in across the board. The small rural counties take longer, and that is about staffing, not attitude. Nobody has made this hard on us. If your texas heir property is in one of the counties above, I have probably already dealt with the office you are about to call.

When we say no

I would rather tell you this on a web page than after you have gotten your hopes up.

We turn deals down. Not every piece of texas heir property is a deal, and usually it is one of three reasons.

Too many heirs. Past about ten, the math stops working, because every additional person is another search, another set of documents and another chance the whole thing stalls. There is an exception. If a property has thirty heirs and we can get twenty or twenty five of them to the table at the same time, that is a deal, because we would end up controlling it. Ten scattered heirs with no momentum is not.

The taxes are worth more than the house. Sometimes a family has waited so long that the delinquent balance is bigger than the property. There is nothing to split at that point and no structure that fixes it.

Heirs are living in it. If the house is somebody’s home, we usually pass. We are not in the business of putting a family out of a house they grew up in, and I do not want to build a company that does that. A vacant house with a fight over it is our deal. An occupied one usually is not.

What it looks like when it goes right

In San Jacinto County there was a piece of land with nine heirs spread across four states. Nobody had signed anything in years. We got every one of them recorded in twenty one days.

In Ector County there were eight heirs on a house in Odessa. Seven sold. The eighth is still deciding, and that is fine, because the seven who wanted out got paid without waiting on him. Nobody has ever called me because their inheritance was going smoothly.

What this means for you

• You do not need everyone to agree to sell your own share.
• You do not need probate to have inherited something. You already own it.
• You do not need to fix the house, clean it out, or pay the taxes first.
• You do not pay us anything. No fees, no commission, no closing costs out of your pocket.
• If an heir is in prison, out of state, or in a nursing home, that is normal and it is solvable.
• The liens transfer to us to negotiate once we own a piece.

The short version

• Texas heir property is a house that passed to the family without a will and without probate.
• Every heir owns a percentage, and a percentage can be sold alone.
• We buy one share, handle the title work and the affidavit, and pay after the deed records.
• The back taxes and the liens become ours, not yours.

If you own a piece of texas heir property and you want out of it, call or text me at 936-380-6384, or fill out the form. Tell me the address and who passed away. I will tell you what I can do with it.