If you’ve been wondering why so many houses in our neighborhoods sit empty for ten, fifteen, twenty years with nobody doing anything about them, the answer is usually three words: heir property situation.
Let me break it down.
What heir property is
Heir property is what happens when somebody dies and the house doesn’t get formally passed to a specific person. The Center for Heirs' Property Preservation has been working on this issue for decades, and the USDA Heirs' Property Relending Program was created specifically because it became impossible to ignore how much family land was getting lost this way. The owner doesn’t have a will, or the will is unclear, or the family never went through probate to settle it. The house becomes legally owned by everybody in the next generation at once — usually a bunch of cousins, sometimes spread across multiple states, sometimes none of them on speaking terms.
Everybody owns a piece. Nobody can sell. Nobody can mortgage. Nobody can fix it up. Nobody can do much of anything without unanimous agreement from a group of people who may not have been in the same room in twenty years.
So the house sits.
Why this happens so much in our community
Real talk: there are reasons heir property is more common in Black families than in white ones, and the reasons aren’t accidental.
- Generations of Black folks didn’t have access to estate planning attorneys, or didn’t trust them, or couldn’t afford them. So wills didn’t get drawn up.
- Many older relatives passed property informally — “the house will go to whichever of y’all wants it” — without any of that being legally documented.
- Probate is expensive and complicated. Plenty of families couldn’t afford to settle estates properly, so the house just stayed in the deceased person’s name and the family kept living there or kept paying taxes on it informally.
- In some states (especially in the South), the laws around heir property have been actively used to take land from Black families for over a century. So a lot of families don’t want to engage with the formal system at all.
The result is that a significant percentage of vacant or near-vacant houses in historically Black neighborhoods are technically heir property — owned by everybody and nobody at the same time.
What heir property looks like from the street
From the sidewalk, it looks like a house that’s quietly decaying. The grass gets cut every once in a while because Cousin Mark drives by from time to time. The porch is sagging. The roof is on year three of needing replacement. Nobody lives there. Nobody can decide what to do with it. Mail still comes for the original owner who passed in 2007.
If you’ve been wondering why that specific kind of house exists, that’s the why.
What can be done
Honestly? Heir property is one of the hardest property situations to unstick. Most of these houses need the family to formally clear title — which means hiring an attorney, getting cousins to agree, and going through court. A lot of families won’t do it. A lot can’t afford to do it. The houses keep sitting.
When we receive a tip on a property that turns out to be heir property, we don’t approach the family. We don’t pressure anybody. We note what we know and move on. But the tip itself helps us understand the patterns in a neighborhood — which blocks have heir property situations, which families have unresolved estates, where the real ownership gap is. That information matters even when it doesn’t lead to a closed opportunity.
Noticed a property worth a closer look?