Hey everybody. It’s Chuck again from Agile Property solutions here in Tri-Cities, Washington. And today I wanted to talk about a deal I did in Yakima, Washington, where there was three siblings whose parents had passed away a number of years ago. I think it was maybe four years previously. And the parents, this house was just sitting there vacant. Nobody living in it. And as far as they knew, they couldn’t do anything with the house. And the reason was is that there was no will and, they didn’t know any better. And as far as they know, if there’s no will, then they have no rights to that house.
Basically what was happening was it had gotten in default, in regards to the property taxes. The parents had owned it outright. It was just sitting there vacant and just racking up property taxes. And it was, I think about three months away from being foreclosed on by the city. And so what we did, because of what we know, and we know how things work, we approached one of the brothers initially and talked with them and basically explained that, hey, you guys are actually entitled to the proceeds of the sale of that property.
And they were totally just blown away by that. The problem was is that they were like, “Well, we know that you go through the probate process,” but none of them had any money for getting an attorney. They had not gone through it before. It’s just one of those deals where the whole idea just seemed too hard and was going to cost too much money. And because there was three of them, none of them were willing or able to actually pony up the cash to do the process.
Instead of that, they basically just said, “Oh, we’ll just let it go.” And that was that. I went to one of the brothers. I explained that, hey, if you guys do want to sell this, we can do this. And we will not have to go through the court system. And we will use a lack of probate affidavit is what it’s called. And what that is essentially is when you get all of the heirs to the estate. As I explained in a previous video, basically that is, it goes from the parents, the living parent, if there is none of that, then it goes to the children, the living children, if one of the children is deceased, then you got to go to their children and you have to get their children plus any living siblings to sign off on the sale.
You’ve got to get all these signatures on it. It is a process, but if you guys are all in alignment and you do want to sell, then it works and we’ve done it several times. In this case, it was a little bit interesting because the three siblings really didn’t get along and they had fallen out. There had been a falling out over the years. They rarely ever talked to each other. We went and met with each one of them individually. We told each person our same story. This is what we can do. And they were all on board. We were able to essentially get them all to agree to sell the house as is, where is. We got all of them to sign.
And then we went through and we went through a local title company. I think that at that time we use, it’s called Pacific Alliance Title in Yakima. They handled all the paperwork for this. And all we had to do was basically get that lack of probate affidavit. We get it notarized so that … and what that is, is basically one of the siblings is swearing that these are the siblings, the other siblings for these parents. And by doing that, you put down their names or contact info and then you have it notarized. And that way, they’re swearing that basically these are the only people that would be entitled to proceeds of this transaction based on their relationship.
Anyways, we got that done, went through a title company. We bought the house. They got paid. They split it three ways because that’s how it works. Basically it all gets split evenly, unless, as I previously explained, one of them is willing to take none or maybe a reduced amount or something like that. But in this case, they all wanted it split three ways. And the cool thing was, is like I said, these people, they’re good people. They just didn’t have a lot of money and they really don’t know the process. We got them some money for their parents’ house.
The state was going to take that house or actually the county, the county was going to take that house and auction it off to the highest bidder. Now, technically they would have been entitled to the proceeds above the tax debt that was owed, but they don’t know that and most people don’t. And you have to actually file for that. We prevented that. We took care of the tax debt as part of the deal. We paid that off.
And then also the really cool thing was, is one of the brothers is disabled a bit. And he was living on basically a social security or state care. And because of this money that we’re giving them, he was able to buy a bunch of items that he needed. I think he was going to get a new bed and some new furniture and clothing and things like that. He had it, but it was older and it was rundown. We thought that was really cool to see that.
Anyways, I just wanted to talk about that deal because it was a good deal for both of us. We got this house. We were able to buy it and get it fixed up and sold, which is, that’s what we do. And then we were also able to help these people that literally were going to get nothing. To them, that was a huge deal. The other thing that came out of it, which was also pretty neat is that by the end of this transaction, they were all back on speaking terms. They were all talking again. And we were able to bring that family back together. I think that they got over their differences because they were able to cooperate and and get this done.
Yeah, it was a really good deal and it worked out for everybody and there was a lot of history with that house. They grew up in that house. And we got to learn a lot of their history and they talked about their dad and there was a lot of stuff still in the basement, a lot of memorabilia that none of them were able to get down in there because it was a dugout basement. But we got some of that stuff for them. But yeah, anyways, I’ll keep rambling on here, but that’s pretty much it.
I just wanted to let you know that it’s because of our expertise and the things that we do on a daily basis, if you’ve got a property and you’re just unsure of what your options are, what you can do with it, give me a call. Even if I’m not the one buying your property, I’ll at least help just get you in the right direction and help you out. I may not be able to buy a property from you, but maybe, hey, you let somebody else know and maybe I’m able to buy a property from them right? It’s all about just doing enough good to where I get some good goodwill back. Anyways, that’s all I have for today and I hope you guys have a good rest of your day. All right. Thank you. Till next time.