You call a title company to get the house sold. They ask for the deed. You send it over, and somebody on the phone says the thing that stops everything: the name on it is your mother’s, and your mother died in 2011.
That’s usually how this starts. Not with a lawsuit — just a phone call where you find out the house your family has lived in for forty years doesn’t legally belong to any of you.
I’m Nick Disney. Jacob Martinez and I have been buying houses in San Antonio since 2009, and this comes up more than almost anything else we see. West Side, South Side, near the East Side — houses that went from a grandmother to her kids to her grandkids without anybody filing the paperwork that would have made it official.
Texas calls it heirs’ property. The name doesn’t matter much. What it does to your family does.
Why the House Doesn’t Belong to Anyone Yet
When somebody dies with a will, a relative files it with the court, a judge signs off, and ownership officially moves. There’s a record. The house can be sold.
When somebody dies without a will — or with a will nobody ever filed — Texas law decides who inherits. That happens on its own. But automatic isn’t the same as recorded. Nobody went to the courthouse. Nothing changed hands on paper.
So at the county, your mother still owns the house. In real life, you and your brother and your sister and a cousin in Houston each own a piece of it. Not a room each — a percentage of the whole thing, all tangled together. If the same thing happened when your grandmother died, you might have nine people who each own a sliver, half of whom you’ve never met.
Every one of them is an owner. Not one of them can sell.
There’s also a clock. Texas gives you four years from the date of death to file a will with the court, and after that the simple options mostly close. Four years sounds like plenty until you’re in it — families spend the first year grieving, the second arguing, and the third meaning to call somebody.
Three Ways This Comes Back on You
You can’t sell. Before a buyer’s bank will lend, a title company has to write a policy promising nobody will turn up later claiming they own the place. No company signs that when the owner on record died fifteen years ago and nine relatives have a claim. Most cash buyers won’t touch it either.
You can’t borrow against it. The family has equity in that house and no way to reach it — which matters when the roof goes, or when the aunt living there needs a wheelchair ramp and no bank will write the loan.
And the one nobody sees coming: you can lose it. Bexar County mails the tax bill to whoever’s listed as owner — a woman who died in 2004, at an address the family stopped checking long ago. The taxes fall behind quietly. By the time anybody notices, there’s a lawsuit and a sale date.
Any Relative Can Force a Sale — Even One You’ve Never Met
In Texas, anybody who owns a piece of a property can ask a judge to sell the whole thing. That includes the second cousin in Houston who’s never paid a dollar toward the taxes and hasn’t been inside since a funeral in 2009.
Texas made this fairer in 2017 with a law usually called the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act. When the owners are related, the judge has to get the house appraised first, and the rest of the family gets first crack at buying out whoever filed at that price. If it does have to sell, the judge is supposed to list it on the open market instead of auctioning it on the courthouse steps — where families used to lose the most money.
Real protection. Still better to get your paperwork straight before somebody files.
Three Ways to Get the Title Fixed
A sworn statement about the family. Lawyers call it an affidavit of heirship. Two people who knew your mother well and don’t stand to inherit anything — an old neighbor, someone from her church — sign a statement laying out who she was married to and who her children are, and it gets recorded at the county. Cheapest and fastest, and San Antonio title companies see them constantly. It doesn’t settle anything in court; it puts enough on the record that a title company may be willing to work with it. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it isn’t.
A court order naming the heirs. You file in Bexar County probate court and a judge issues an order saying who the heirs are and what share each gets. Costs more, takes longer — the court appoints a lawyer to stand in for relatives nobody can find, and runs a legal notice in case somebody comes forward. But you walk out with a judge’s order instead of a sworn statement, and that settles it. When heirs are missing, arguing, or spread across three generations, this is usually the honest answer.
Full probate. With real debts or somebody contesting things, you’re into a full estate administration, and selling a home during probate becomes its own project. Months, not weeks.
I’m not an attorney, and which one fits depends on things I can’t see from here. Talk to a probate attorney before spending money on any of it. The Bexar County probate guides are worth reading first, though the county doesn’t hand out forms.
What This Looked Like for One East Side Family
A few years back, Crystal and her siblings called us about a house on Lakewood. They’d inherited it from their mother, and the family side was complicated the way these usually are. They weren’t trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the place — they wanted to figure out what they actually owned, sell it, and close a chapter that had been open too long. What they didn’t have was anybody telling them how.
We put our resources to work on the heirship side and walked them through it a step at a time. It took real effort and a while. But the title got cleared, we bought the house, and they moved on.
That’s the honest shape of these. Nobody skips the paperwork, including us. What selling to a cash buyer changes is everything after it — no repairs, no strangers walking through while your family is still deciding things, no more months of taxes and utilities on an empty house. Get quotes from two probate attorneys before you decide you can’t afford this. Most families guess high by a lot.
Questions We Get About This
Q: Can one of us sell the house without the others? A: Almost never. Each of you owns a percentage of the whole house rather than a specific part, so selling it normally takes everyone’s signature. You can sell your own percentage, but almost nobody wants to buy a fraction of a house.
Q: My brother won’t sign. What happens now? A: Three choices — keep talking, buy out his share, or ask a court to sell. The court route is slow, expensive, and usually damages the family, so exhaust the first two.
Q: We can’t find one of the heirs. Does that stop everything? A: No. A judge can name the heirs even when someone is missing. The court appoints a lawyer to represent relatives who can’t be found and runs a legal notice in case they come forward.
Q: The property taxes are behind. How much time do we have? A: Call the Bexar County Tax Assessor-Collector and ask. Notices on these houses go to someone who died years ago, so families are often further behind than they realize.
Q: How long does it take to get the title fixed? A: A sworn statement can come together in a few weeks when the family history is clear and everyone cooperates. A court order naming the heirs generally takes months. If relatives are fighting, longer.
Q: Can we sell before the title is cleared? A: You can sign a contract, but you can’t close. A title company has to insure the sale, and that means the ownership question gets answered first. Anybody telling you otherwise isn’t being straight with you.
Where to Start
This isn’t really a house problem. It’s a paperwork problem that’s been quietly getting worse, sometimes for decades, while the tax bills kept coming and the roof kept getting older.
The families who get through it fastest make two calls. One to a probate attorney, to find out which of those three routes they’re in. One to the tax office, to find out whether a clock is running they don’t know about.
We’ll look at a house in whatever shape it’s in — the building and the paperwork both — and tell you straight whether we can help. If the title isn’t clean enough yet, we’ll say so instead of tying your house up under contract.
Is the house still in your mom’s name? We buy San Antonio houses as-is, including the complicated ones, or call (210) 201-6644. Somebody picks up, day or night.