Selling a house you inherited often means selling it from another town or another state, with an estate to settle and a home still full of a lifetime of belongings. The agent you hire should take the house off your plate while the estate’s attorney handles the legal side.
Dennis Mark Interdonato is a Realtor® with Keller Williams Realty Ocean Living, working out of Brick and Point Pleasant, and a former New Jersey home builder and residential remodeler. He starts with a market evaluation, so the executor, the heirs and the attorney all work from the same number. He can arrange the estate sale and a full clean-out, tells you which repairs pay you back and which don’t, and sends every heir the same written update at each step, wherever they live.
One Ocean County estate home still held everything inside it when the client came to him. He arranged the estate sale and the clean-out, got the home ready for buyers, contacted potential buyers, and worked through some unexpected challenges to get to the closing table.
The legal steps stay with the estate’s attorney. In New Jersey, the Surrogate’s Court in the county where the person lived gives an executor or administrator the authority to act for the estate (here, the Ocean County Surrogate), and New Jersey usually requires a tax waiver before estate real estate can change hands. He values the home and gets it ready while that work is under way, so the house isn’t what holds things up.
In his words: “I got a guy for everything.” See Probate & Estates.
