Selling inherited property: three things heirs usually do not know

The hardest part is not the sale

Selling inherited property is the only job where I talk to clients about people more than about square metres. There are several decision-makers, each with a different relationship to the home, and usually somebody has recently died. There is no need to rush.

What is worth knowing is where the process most often gets stuck. It is almost always one of three places.

1. You cannot sell what is not in your name in the Land Register

The most common misunderstanding. Someone calls to say their mother's apartment is empty and they would like to put it up for sale. I ask whether the succession proceedings have been done. The answer is often that there is a will — as if that were enough.

A will is not ownership. Before a sale there has to be:

1. Succession proceedings opened with a notary. One of the heirs does this by application.
2. A certificate of succession issued. This is the document that states who the heirs are and in what shares.
3. The Land Register entry changed into the heirs' names.

Only then can you sell. It takes time, and that time has to be built into the sales plan — not discovered a week before the notary, when the buyer has already been found and their loan decision is about to expire.

The other thing people often do not know: obligations come with an inheritance too. If the deceased had debts or a mortgage, those do not disappear with the succession. If the picture is unclear, find out before you accept anything — and ask the notary handling the proceedings for advice on it.

2. The tax question that usually comes as a surprise

When you sell an inherited apartment you have no acquisition cost in the sense that someone who bought the apartment themselves has. You have not paid for it, so there is no sum by which to reduce the proceeds.

In practice that means the tax liability can be considerably larger than the heirs imagine. There are exceptions in the rules — for example, it matters whether the property has been someone's own home, and for how long.

I am not a tax adviser and I am not going to give you a number here. Give yourself one simple rule: before you agree a price, get an answer about your specific situation from the Tax and Customs Board or from a tax adviser. The difference between knowing and not knowing can be several thousand euros, and it cannot be put right afterwards.

If there are several heirs, that calculation has to be done for each of them separately. Situations differ.

3. Several heirs means one objector stops everything

If the apartment belongs to several heirs in co-ownership, one heir cannot sell it alone. The decision has to be joint. This is where families most often get stuck — not out of ill will, but because someone has a different timeframe or a different price expectation.

What helps:

• One representative. A notarised power of attorney for one heir, who deals with the broker, the notary and the buyer. Otherwise every question goes through four phones and the answer takes a week.
• An agreed price expectation before the listing. Write down the lower limit you are all willing to go to. Without it, the first offer produces an argument instead of a decision.
• A clear agreement on costs and shares. Who pays the utilities during the sale, how the proceeds are divided, what happens to the furniture and the personal belongings.
• The buy-out option. If one wants to sell and another does not, the more sensible solution is often for one to buy out the other's share. That needs an honest valuation, and I give one the same way I would for a sale.

If no agreement is reached, there is also the route of ending the co-ownership through the courts. It is slow and expensive, and the outcome is almost always worse for everyone than an agreement. I only recommend it when there is genuinely no other way.

Practical things that are usually left to the last minute

• Utilities and the housing association. Check the arrears and the state of the renovation loan. The buyer's bank will ask for them anyway, and a debt discovered on the day of the deal means a postponement.
• Clearing out. Personal belongings have to be gone through, and that is the emotionally hardest part. Give yourself real time for it, not one Saturday.
• Insurance and heating. An empty apartment in winter is a risk. Do not let the insurance lapse.
• Do not renovate. In an inherited apartment the temptation to “tidy it up just a little more” is strong. Most of that money is lost. Clearing out, cleaning and proper photos give you more.

How I help here

I do not run succession proceedings or do the tax calculation — that is the work of a notary and a tax adviser. But I know the order things have to happen in, and I can tell you what the apartment is worth today and what a realistic timeline looks like.

If you have inherited property and do not know where to start, call. Most of these conversations begin with somebody saying: “I do not even know what to ask.” That is a perfectly good place to start.