A parcel in a state you've never been to, that you didn't know existed until the estate paperwork arrived.
Inherited land arrives differently from an inherited house. A house is obvious, visible, and immediately demands decisions. A parcel of vacant land often surfaces quietly — a tax statement forwarded from an old address, a line in an estate inventory, a deed in a folder — for land in a county the family has no connection to and, frequently, that nobody living has ever visited.
Which leaves heirs in an odd position: responsible for something they can't picture, can't easily value, and can't sell through the normal channels, while the tax bill keeps arriving.
Depending on how the land was held and whether an estate was opened, that may be an heir directly, an executor or personal representative, or a trustee. A deed can't transfer until someone has that authority.
Older rural parcels are often held by heirs who never formally divided them, sometimes across two or three generations. Title work sorts this out and it's common.
If all you have is an old deed or a tax bill, we can usually locate the parcel from the legal description or the parcel number.
Years of unpaid taxes are frequent on inherited land, particularly where tax notices were still going to a deceased owner's address.
Land with back taxes →Whether the estate needs probate, who is authorised to sign, and what the tax consequences of a sale would be are legal and tax questions specific to your state and estate. Please get those answers from a probate attorney and a CPA. We're buyers, not advisors, and we'd rather you check than take our word for it.
Land splits badly among heirs. A house can at least be lived in or rented by one of them; an empty parcel four states away benefits nobody, and co-owning it just means everyone shares a tax bill and needs consensus for every future decision. In practice that means either someone eventually buys the others out, or it's sold.
If there are several of you, we'll send the same written offer to every heir who wants it, so nobody is deciding based on what a sibling told them the land was worth. We won't lobby one heir against another, and we won't put a deadline on the decision.
If all you have is a deed in a folder or a forwarded tax statement, that's usually enough. A tax bill carries the parcel number, and a deed carries a legal description that can be matched against the county's records. Send whatever paperwork you found, even if it's decades old, and we'll identify the parcel and confirm where it sits before anything else happens.
Inherited land often falls behind on taxes simply because notices still go to the deceased owner's address. Whoever is handling the estate may want to make sure the county has a current mailing address, even before deciding whether to sell. If a balance has already built up, our page on selling land with back taxes explains how it's generally handled at closing.
Heirs sometimes feel they should commission a survey, clear brush or travel to see the parcel before talking to a buyer. None of that is needed for an offer from us, and our costs and fees page lists what we pay. If the land is in a state none of you live in, our page for out-of-state owners explains how a fully remote sale works.
Send us whatever you have — a parcel number, an old tax bill, even just the county and the deceased owner's name. We can usually find it.
Send Us the Parcel Details