What is Probate

Buying Real Estate in Probate

Understand Probate

What is probate? You must understand a few basics about probate before thinking about investing in probate real estate. Once you understand the reality of probate, and what it does to the parties involved, you will be able to decide if this is an area of real estate investing that you want to investigate.

What is Probate?

According to the dictionary, probate is the court-supervised process by which a deceased person’s property is sold to pay their debts and to distribute the proceeds of the sale to the rightful heirs.

Probate Pressure Cooker

However, the reality is that the probate process if something entirely different. Probate is…a pressure cooker. Once the probate process goes to the personal representative, little by little the pressure begins to build. That’s the Probate Problem.

Like a geyser, the more time that passes, with the personal representative dealing with the million-and-one details, the more pressure is going to build and that's when something is going to explode. When that happens, the smart real estate investor gets to buy the property.

Why Probate Real Estate?

There are several reasons why you should consider Probate Real Estate Investing.

1. Sellers are Motivated - The longer the personal representative deals with the property, the more the pressure builds and the closer the situation gets to exploding.
   
2. High Equity – Often these houses have actually been paid off, or have been owned long enough that the equity is very high.
   
3. No Personal Investment – It is very seldom that the personal representatives have invested their own money in the property.
   
4. No Emotional Attachment – Often the personal representative has no emotional tie to the property
   
5. Not a Lot of Competition - Why? Because most investors don’t like being yelled at
   

Perspective is Vital

Perspective is point of view. Without the right perspective, of being able to put oneself into another’s shoes, the real estate investor won’t know how to approach the probate personal representative.

This lack of perspective means they end up being yelled at, called bad names and emotionally dumped on.

Before long, they’ve called it quits and moved on to other areas of real estate investing.

To that magic phrase that will get you past that initial contact with the personal representative, order the entire Buying Real Estate in Probate package.