A house in West Roxbury bought in 1974 for thirty-two thousand dollars is worth close to a million today. When it passes to three siblings who live in Boston, Denver, and Charlotte, what happens next is usually nothing, for about eighteen months, while everyone waits for someone else to start.

If that is your family, here is the actual sequence. It is less complicated than the silence suggests, but the order matters, and doing step four before step two costs money.

Step one: establish who has authority to sell

Nobody can sign a deed until this is settled, and it is where most families lose their first six months.

If the property was held in a trust, the trustee has authority under the trust instrument and the property may pass outside probate entirely. This is the fastest path and it is why estate planning attorneys push trusts.

If the property was held jointly with right of survivorship, it passes to the surviving owner by operation of law. Check the deed. Boston families frequently hold property in ways nobody in the current generation has looked at.

If the property was owned solely by the deceased with no trust, it goes through probate in the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court for the county where the person lived. Suffolk County for Boston, Middlesex for Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, and much of MetroWest, Norfolk for Brookline, Dedham, and the towns south. A personal representative is appointed, and that person is who signs.

Massachusetts offers different probate procedures depending on the situation, and which one applies affects the timeline substantially. This is the first question for the estate's attorney, and it should be asked in week one rather than month six.

Step two: get a date-of-death valuation

Do this before you clean the house out. Before you paint. Before anything.

Inherited property generally receives a stepped-up cost basis to the fair market value on the date of death. That step-up is the single largest financial fact in most inherited home sales. A house bought for thirty-two thousand dollars and worth nine hundred fifty thousand on the date of death has a basis of roughly nine hundred fifty thousand, not thirty-two thousand. Sell it for nine hundred seventy-five thousand and the taxable gain is measured from the stepped-up figure, not from what your parents paid.

To claim that basis you need documentation of value as of the date of death. A formal appraisal is the cleanest. A well-documented broker valuation can serve depending on the estate's circumstances and what the attorney and accountant advise. What does not work is reconstructing the number two years later from memory.

This also matters enormously for the Massachusetts estate tax, and here are the actual numbers.

For deaths on or after January 1, 2023, Massachusetts exempts the first $2,000,000 of an estate, delivered as a credit of up to $99,600. Above that, graduated rates start around 7.2 percent and top out at 16 percent. Massachusetts has no inheritance tax, and there is no portability between spouses — a surviving spouse cannot use the deceased spouse's unused exemption without a credit shelter trust structure.

Now set that against the federal number. The federal exemption is roughly $15,000,000 per person in 2026. So a Boston family can owe the Commonwealth a substantial estate tax while owing the IRS nothing at all, and families who updated their planning based on federal headlines routinely miss this.

Here is the part that catches West Roxbury and Dorchester families specifically: a house worth $950,000 plus retirement accounts plus life insurance plus a securities account crosses $2,000,000 without anyone in the family thinking of themselves as wealthy. The return, Form M-706, is due nine months from the date of death, and payment is generally due then too. There is also an automatic Massachusetts estate tax lien that attaches to Massachusetts real estate, which is a practical problem at closing if it has not been addressed.

Step three: sort out the carrying costs, immediately

The house has costs from the day of death. Property taxes continue. Insurance is the urgent one.

A homeowner's policy on a vacant property behaves differently than one on an occupied property, and many policies restrict or exclude coverage once a home has been unoccupied beyond a stated period, commonly thirty or sixty days. Families discover this after a pipe freezes. Call the carrier, tell them the truth about occupancy, and get a vacant property endorsement or a separate policy. The premium is annoying. The alternative is a burst pipe in an uninsured house in February.

If there is a mortgage or a home equity line, it continues. If there is a reverse mortgage, the clock is different and shorter, and that needs immediate attention.

Step four: decide among the siblings, in writing, before you list

The three-way split is where these sales break down, and the disagreement is almost never about price. It is about time and effort.

The sibling who lives in Boston does all the work. The siblings in Denver and Charlotte have opinions about the price. Six months in, the local sibling is resentful and the remote siblings feel excluded, and someone starts talking about buying the others out at a number that has no basis.

Settle three things up front. Who has decision authority on price and offers, and is it unanimous or majority. How the person doing the physical work is compensated, and it should be something. And what the actual objective is: maximum price, or fastest resolution. Those are different strategies and a family that has not chosen between them will fight about every offer.

If one sibling wants to keep the house, that is a buyout, and a buyout needs an independent valuation and a real financing conversation. Handshake buyouts among siblings produce the worst family outcomes I have seen in this business.

Step five: decide how much to do to the property

Boston inherited homes are usually in one of two conditions. Well maintained but forty years out of date, or genuinely deferred.

The instinct is to renovate. In this market that is frequently the wrong call. There is a real buyer pool in Boston and MetroWest for unrenovated single-family homes with good bones, and it includes both builders and owner-occupants who want to do the work themselves. Selling to that buyer means no construction management from three time zones away, no permitting, no cost overruns, and no carrying costs for eight months.

What is almost always worth doing: a full cleanout, a deep clean, exterior cleanup and landscaping, and the specific repairs that scare buyers disproportionately relative to their cost, which usually means anything visibly water-related and anything about the roof. What is usually not worth doing on an inherited property: kitchens, baths, and windows.

The cleanout itself deserves a warning. Do not throw anything out before someone has walked the house looking for documents, savings bonds, jewelry, and anything with the deceased's name on it. Estate cleanout companies are efficient and that efficiency has cost families real money.

Step six: understand the tax picture before you sign a listing agreement, not after

Three things to settle with the estate's accountant.

The stepped-up basis figure and the documentation supporting it. Whether the sale is reported by the estate or by the beneficiaries after distribution, which changes who reports the gain and can change the outcome. And the Massachusetts estate tax exposure, which is a separate question from any capital gain on the sale.

Also note the Massachusetts deeds excise, the transfer tax paid by the seller at closing. In most counties it runs $4.56 per $1,000 of sale price, which is $2.28 per $500 of consideration. On a $950,000 sale that is $4,332. Barnstable County and the Cape and Islands add their own land bank fees on top. It is not the largest line on a net sheet but it should be on it from the first conversation, not discovered at closing.

Timeline, honestly

If the property was in a trust and the family is aligned, you can be on the market in four to six weeks and closed in another two months. If it is in probate, add the time to appoint a personal representative, which varies with the court's schedule and whether the filing is clean.

The single largest variable is not the court. It is whether the family has settled step four.

I have handled these for families where everyone lived within a mile and for families spread across four states. Send me the address and tell me where things stand, and I will lay out the sequence for your specific situation, including which questions belong with the attorney and the accountant rather than with me. There is no urgency from my end and no cost to the conversation.

Chris Remmes, Managing Broker, Remmes & Co. [email protected] | 617-398-0015