Silicon Valley Probate & Estate Sales

Somebody died, and somehow you're the one holding the folder. Maybe you were named in the will, maybe the court appointed you, maybe you raised your hand because nobody else would. Either way there's a house with your name attached to it now, and your brother, your aunt and the attorney are all asking what the plan is.

Here's what I want you to know before we go any further. The house is almost always the largest asset in the estate, and it's the piece with the most room to get right or get badly wrong. A tired listing that sits for ninety days and takes a lowball offer costs the heirs real money. So does saying yes to the investor who knocked on the door with a cash offer three weeks after the funeral. The distance between those outcomes and a good one comes down to knowing what you're allowed to do, and in what order.

You don't need to understand probate before you call me. You need the address and a rough sense of what's going on. I'll take it from there.

California's Independent Administration of Estates Act splits estate representatives into two camps, and which camp you're in shapes the entire sale. Your Letters Testamentary or Letters of Administration say which one you got, and it's printed right on the form.

Full authority

You can sell the house essentially the way any other owner would. List it, take offers, negotiate, and once you have a deal you send a Notice of Proposed Action to the heirs, the devisees and anyone who filed a request for special notice. They get fifteen days to object. If nobody objects, escrow closes with no court hearing, no newspaper publication, no minimum price rule and no court-set commission. Most of the probate sales I handle run this way, and they feel like ordinary transactions. Santa Clara County does want a copy of that notice filed with proof of service, so your attorney will take care of that piece.

Limited authority, or no IAEA authority at all

Now the court is in the room. Notice of the sale gets published in a newspaper of general circulation. The accepted price has to be at least ninety percent of the probate referee's appraised value, and that appraisal has to be less than a year old as of the hearing date. Within thirty days of accepting a contract, a Report of Sale and Petition for Order Confirming Sale goes to the court along with a copy of the contract. Then everybody shows up at a hearing where a stranger is allowed to outbid your buyer.

Neither one is bad. They're different games with different rules, and pricing, marketing and how hard I qualify buyers all change depending on which one we're playing. If you're not sure what your Letters say, read me the line and I'll tell you what it means for the property.

Go Over Your Letters With Me

The stepped-up basis is usually the whole ballgame

When an owner dies, the property's tax basis generally resets to its fair market value as of the date of death. A house bought in Sunnyvale in 1974 for forty-eight thousand dollars and worth two point three million today carries an enormous built-in gain during the owner's lifetime, and most of that gain disappears at death. If the estate sells reasonably soon afterward, the taxable gain is often small. The probate referee's date of death appraisal is strong documentation for that number, though it isn't a tax ruling and your CPA is the one who should bless it.

Proposition 19 is where families get hurt

Since February 2021, an inherited home only keeps its low Prop 13 property tax basis if the heir moves in as their own primary residence within a year and files for the homeowners' exemption inside that same year. Even then the protection is capped. If the market value at death exceeds the old assessed value by more than $1,044,586, which is the figure in effect through February 2027, the excess gets added back to the assessment.

In this county that cap gets blown through constantly. A home assessed at a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and worth two and a half million produces a property tax bill that jumps from a few thousand dollars a year to north of twenty thousand. Rentals and second homes get no exclusion at all anymore. If somebody in the family is planning to keep the house, run those numbers before the decision gets made rather than after.

I'm happy to do that math with you. I'll put a realistic sale price next to what the property tax bill would become under Prop 19, so you have something concrete to bring back to your siblings and your attorney.

Run the Numbers With Me

You might not need a full probate at all

Since April 2025, a decedent's primary residence worth $750,000 or less can pass through a Petition to Determine Succession to Primary Residence instead of a full probate, and the small estate affidavit limit for personal property now sits at $208,850. Those thresholds rarely rescue a Santa Clara County house, but they come up on properties in other counties and it's worth five minutes of checking before anybody files a petition.

None of this is legal or tax advice, and I'm not an attorney or a CPA. It's the set of issues that comes up on nearly every estate I touch, and it's what I'd want somebody to tell me before I made a decision I couldn't take back.

Do I even have to sell the house?

No. You sell when the will directs it, when the estate needs cash to pay debts, taxes and administration costs, or when the heirs would rather have money than a shared house. If everyone genuinely wants to keep it, the real questions become Prop 19 and who is buying out whom, and that conversation is far cheaper to have early than late.

Can I sell before the court appoints me?

Not really. Nobody has authority to sign for the estate until Letters are issued, so a contract signed before then is on shaky ground. What you can do during those weeks is get an opinion of value, get the house cleaned out and have a plan ready to go the day your appointment comes through.

Do probate homes sell for less?

They sell for less when they're marketed like nobody cares about the outcome. The ninety percent rule sets a floor, not a target, and buyers will absolutely try the distressed-estate discount on you if they sense the seller is tired. I list these the same way I list anything else, because the heirs are entitled to the same result any other seller would get.

What is an overbid, and should I be worried about one?

At a confirmation hearing, any qualified buyer can appear and bid the property up. The first overbid has to beat the accepted price by ten percent of the first ten thousand dollars plus five percent of everything above that, so a $1,200,000 accepted offer needs $1,260,500 to open the bidding. It doesn't happen on most sales, and when it does the estate comes out ahead, but it's the reason court-confirmed contracts carry big deposits and very short contingency periods.

How long is this going to take?

Probate in Santa Clara County typically runs somewhere between nine and eighteen months from start to finish, and the sale is a much smaller piece of that than people expect. With full authority we can often be in contract within weeks of your appointment and closed a month or so after that. The court-confirmed path adds roughly thirty to sixty days for the hearing.

Who pays for the clean-out and the repairs?

Usually the estate does, out of the proceeds at closing. When there's no cash on hand, Compass Concierge can cover the work up front and get repaid at close, which keeps you from funding the estate out of your own pocket and waiting to be reimbursed.

I live out of state. Is that a problem?

That describes most of my probate clients. Everything except the court appearances can be handled remotely, and I'm on the ground here to meet the crews, walk the property and send you photos and video so you always know what's actually happening inside the house.

Do you work with the attorney or around them?

With, always. I'm an affiliate member of the Professional Fiduciary Association of California and I work alongside probate attorneys, private professional fiduciaries and public administrators on a regular basis. Your attorney handles the law and I handle the property, and I get them what they need from my side before they have to ask twice.

Have a question that isn't on this list? Call or text me at 408.413.3087, or grab a time on my calendar and we'll talk it through. Every estate is a little different, and the answer to your question probably depends on something in your Letters or your family that I'd want to hear about first.

Ask Me Your Question