Why That Sentence Works
It is a genuine obstacle to a purchase, so a buyer has to say what they intend to do about it. And there are only really two kinds of answer.
One kind treats the ownership as something to be established before a transaction can happen. The other treats it as something to be worked around. The full position is on our page covering heirs property and the Pinckney Act.
Is a Buyer Who Suggests Buying Your Share Doing Something Illegal?
The Buyer Who Says Establish It First
They will ask who has died, whether there were wills, and whether anything was ever probated. They will usually suggest a South Carolina lawyer, and they will not be in a hurry.
Their offer takes longer to arrive and it is for the whole property with everybody signing, which is the only version that leaves the family with a clean outcome.
The Buyer Who Offers to Start With Yours
The one to end the conversation with. An offer for your fractional interest only, without the other owners being part of it, is the beginning of the pattern the Act was written about.
What follows: acquiring a share makes somebody a cotenant, and a cotenant can petition for partition. The Act now gives your family a buyout right, a proper appraisal and an open-market sale by default rather than an auction. Those protections are real and they are protections against a situation you can simply decline to enter.
The Buyer Who Offers to Talk to the Family for You
Sounds helpful and is not. A buyer contacting your relatives individually is a buyer having separate conversations with people who should be having one conversation together.
The rule worth holding: nobody outside the family approaches the family. If a buyer wants everyone in the room, they can ask you to arrange it.
The Buyer Who Is in a Hurry
Establishing ownership on inherited property takes weeks and often months. Any buyer whose offer expires before that can be done is applying pressure to a process that cannot be accelerated.
The test: ask whether their figure holds while the title work is done. A buyer who has done these files says yes and explains what would change it.
The Buyer Who Has Not Asked About Insurance
On heirs' property the insurance is frequently inadequate or in one occupant's name only, and that changes what money is coming.
The question that reveals them: ask whether they want to know how the property was insured and by whom. A buyer working in this market asks it early, because the answer changes the whole file.
Contract Assigners
Some parties sign to buy and sell the contract on before closing. On a property requiring many signatures, an unknown eventual purchaser is an additional uncertainty in a transaction that already has enough.
The question that catches it: which entity will appear on the deed. A principal buyer gives you a name.
The Checks Worth Making Yourself
A South Carolina lawyer. Before answering anybody who mentions your share. The single most valuable thing on this page.
The Register of Deeds. For what has been recorded against the property.
The probate court. For what has been administered, in every county a relevant relative lived in.
An agent with no interest in the outcome. For what the repaired house is worth.
Where We Fit, and Where We Do Not
We buy as principal, in our own entity, with our own funds, and we take title. We do not assign contracts. We do not buy fractional interests, we do not approach other owners, and we have never filed a partition action.
We are frequently not the right answer. Across the ring cities and much of North Main, where the title is clean and the frame survived, repairing or a conventional sale will beat us outright. Our written figure says so when the numbers point there. What happens from there is on our page about how the process actually runs.
Questions About Buyers
One Offer Is Far Above the Others.
Check whether it is for the whole property or for a share. Those are not comparable numbers and they are frequently presented as though they were.
A Buyer Contacted My Cousin Directly.
Tell the rest of the family and speak to a South Carolina lawyer. Separate conversations are how these situations start.
Does a Buyer Need a Licence?
Not to buy as a principal and take title. Marketing property on behalf of others requires a South Carolina real estate licence, and the state lookup is free.