Hey everybody, Tom Townsend with Townsend Realty Group right here in Cherokee County, Georgia. Do you want to know how to sell a property held in Cobb or Cherokee County probate? Well, I wanted to bring you to you a case study of one of the services that we provide here at Townsend Realty Group, and that is probate services.
Now, just as a reminder, I’m sure everybody is aware of what is probate? Probate is when unfortunately someone passes away and they were not clear in a will, or maybe they didn’t have a will, that indicated where their assets were going. So, obviously the courts get involved, in particular, the probate court gets involved, and they will assign a personal representative to handle the assets of that individual. They get to say yes or no, but if they accept it, then they’re the personal representative that handles it. Then they will be working with the attorney to be able to guide them. The attorney will guide them through the whole probate process. However, there are tons of things that the individual representative has to handle. So, the attorney doesn’t do this for you.
You have to hire, you have to seek out, hire all the services that are involved with this distributing or selling the assets that are in the estate itself, handling all the money and all the decision-making. Now this particular case that I’m going to show you was pretty simple because, unfortunately, the deceased had no relatives whatsoever, no living relatives. And I say that’s simply because many times when you have family members involved, it gets very emotional. You have to come to a consensus, and the disputes over what happens to the money, and the property, and who gets what can be an absolute mess to maneuver through.
Yes, the probate attorney will help out with that, but many times we are the front line people, on the line, and people are always usually staring at us asking us what in the world they should do. So, we always end up helping them maneuver through that whole process.
So anyway, some of the services that are involved with probate are going to be much more involved than your typical person that’s trying to just sell their house and move to a new one. And that’s kind of why I wanted to do this case study.
We’ve been doing this for quite some time and helping folks out, and it just kind of highlights the uniqueness of the services that we provide. So, as you can see, this gentleman, this personal representative that called us, that unbelievably said, “Yeah, I’ll go ahead and handle his estate.” He was a great neighbor. He was just shocked when he actually walked into this property. He called us just in a panic, not really knowing what in the heck to do.
So, obviously, one of the things that we do is we walk in and we help them prepare the estate. We bring complete estate solutions. We can bring in clean-out crews. We bring in auction companies to be able to do auctions on personal property, organize it, distribute it. We also bring in nonprofit organizations, if there’s a bunch of stuff that needs to be given away. So, we really kind of help these folks hold their hand through that, to handle all the different personal property.
Then we obviously help them get the property ready to sell and actually sell it for them. So, they’re not burdened with something that they’re just not familiar with. As you can see, this happens quite a bit. This particular house, when we walked up to it, very overgrown, lots of vegetation everywhere. That’s pretty common. When we walk into some of these places, you can’t even tell what kind of condition the property is in because it is so overgrown. So, there’s a lot of assumptions that we have to make as far as the overall condition of the property and making that assessment.
Now, obviously, when we walk into the property, and this isn’t all that uncommon, but you find just a lot of personal property that is still there at the house. And I think that was the most overwhelming thing for the personal representative when they were actually walking through the property itself. They just had no idea what to do with all this stuff. Some of it has value, some of it doesn’t. They don’t want to just throw it all away. So, they want to organize it and they want to try and sell it.
Now in this particular case, it’s interesting, because there are no heirs, all the proceeds, all the money that’s left over after everything is sold and all the creditors are paid, all the remaining of the balance is going to go back to the state. So, there’s no one making any money on this stuff.
So, the personal representative is like, ” You know, to be honest with you, how hard am I going to work for the state here? You know, I thought I was doing this guy a favor.” So, as you can see it’s just overwhelming with all the personal property and everything that’s actually onsite. So, what we do is we bring in these companies to come in, go through all this stuff, all this personal property, sort it out, find out what we can give away to charities, sell the rest of it. Then what we do is we actually usually take the proceeds from the sale of all the personal property, and we may end up having to put it back into the property with repairs and updates in order to even sell it.
As you can see this kitchen, I believe probably is pretty much trashed. Now it’s going to be very unlikely, we’re not going to know this until everything is out, but it’s going to be very unlikely that we’ll be able to sell this through a conventional sale to someone that’s going to buy it and live into it, and own it. This will most likely end up being sold to an investor who’s going to come in and renovate the property, and either hold onto it for a rental or turn around and sell it for a profit. So, all we’re trying to do is get it cleaned up, make it presentable, and then be able to get it marketed on the market itself, and probably market it towards the investment group.
So, that’s really what our plan of action is with these Probate cases. Now, once again, until all the personal property is out, I really can’t tell what kind of overall condition this property is in. It may be in halfway decent condition, I don’t know. But my assumption is the bathrooms are pretty beat up, and that the kitchen is pretty beat up. I just don’t see that occurring.
That’s kind of what we end up doing with probate. That’s a typical probates case. Continue to watch this, or subscribe to our YouTube channel because we’re going to be doing updates on this one. As we get in there and we start cleaning everything out, we’ll give you updates, and then we’ll show you what the finished product is when it gets all done.
If you like this video, give us a thumbs up. We appreciate it. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and continue to follow the progress of this particular property. And hey, if you know anybody out there wanting to know How to Sell a Property Held in Cobb or Cherokee County Probate, or trying to handle it an estate on their own, reach out to us. We’d be more than happy to give them some guidance, or even talk to them about helping them out. Hopefully, this was helpful and I hope everybody’s having a great day, thanks.
WE’RE READY TO HELP YOU BUY OR SELL YOUR Cobb or Cherokee County HOME AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND AT THE BEST PRICE POSSIBLE. TO DISCOVER MORE, CONTACT US AT 770-280-4560 OR FILL OUT OUR ONLINE FORM.
