Estate Headache: Selling High-Priced Family Home
Seemingly, heirs might be happy to hear that they have inherited a share in a family home worth millions. But in actual practice, handling such estates can prove a major headache for the lawyers, real estate agents and other professionals involved.
Especially if Mom and Dad—who are the usual source of such bequests—have lingered, rather than dying suddenly, sibling rivalry may have heated up during the stressful period before their demise, reports the New York Times. Then liquidating the family home left to the children, which typically requires all of the heirs to agree on terms such as price, can easily become focused on emotional issues and power plays.
Battling heirs can take months to agree on a price, and a decade or longer can elapse before the sale actually takes place, the newspaper writes. Further problems can be posed if one sibling gains access to the home and refuses to leave.
One Manhattan real estate broker recalls a man who needed to sort through papers in his deceased mother’s postwar three-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side several years ago. Michele Kleier, president of Gumley Haft Kleier, showed the home some 50 times over the next six months.
Each time, “He would always be home. He would follow us around and say things like, ‘I can picture Mom in bed, dying,’ or ‘I remember when she had the IV dripping into her arm—it was such a torturous few years,’ or ‘Make sure you don’t leave your key with the doorman because my mother had a lot of things disappear,’ ” she recounts. “He would have his computer tuned to a porn site, so you would walk by and see the most vile photos. He made the apartment as messy as he could. He smoked cigars. He wouldn’t open the blinds or flush the toilets.”
Finally, the executor went to court to remove him from the apartment, and it sold for $2.6 million—some $300,000 less, Kleier estimates, than the heirs might have gotten absent his interference.
“You would think it would be easy because there’s money at the end of the rainbow, but there are more problems than you would think,” says Adam Leitman Bailey, who works in Manhattan as a real estate lawyer. “This is one of those cataclysmic events that really shake everybody up. It’s just like in a divorce, where you don’t use your brain—you use your emotions. So you’re hurt, you’re not thinking clearly, and a lot of the time the person that dies is the one who used to give you advice.”
