Notes on probate, trust sales, and the moments where real estate decisions matter.
Short pieces, written for the personal representative or successor trustee who’s looking for a specific answer at 11 p.m. No 2,400-word listicles.
What investors send you the week your probate is filed.
Within days of filing DE-111, your inbox and mailbox fill with cash offers. Here’s what those letters actually mean, what to do with them, and when one of them is worth a phone call.
Three siblings, one house: how the buyout math actually works.
The trust splits everything three ways. One sibling wants to keep the house. The math is doable, but every family I’ve walked through this misses two things.
The HECM clock: six months, two extensions, and what to do in the first week.
If a reverse-mortgaged home was just inherited, the most important phone call is to the servicer — not the Realtor. Here’s exactly what to say.
Probate home values in LA County: what 18 months of inventory looks like.
Probate sales in Los Angeles closed at a median 96% of list in the trailing twelve months. Numbers, charts, and what they mean for pricing a 2026 estate sale.
The overbid hearing: what actually happens in court.
Limited-authority sales end in a confirmation hearing where strangers can show up with cashier’s checks and bid against your accepted offer. I’ve been to a lot of these. They’re calmer than you expect.
Heggstad petitions: the probate workaround when the deed never made it into the trust.
Your parent created a living trust but never recorded the deed transferring the home into it. Probate isn’t the only path. A Heggstad petition can fix this in about four months.
Stepped-up basis and Proposition 19: the two tax questions every heir asks.
What “stepped-up basis” actually means for the capital gains math, and how Prop 19 changed the rules for keeping a parent’s low tax assessment after inheritance.
Why probate filing fees jumped (a little) in 2026, and why it still doesn’t matter.
The DE-111 filing fee is roughly $435 in most California counties as of January 2026. In the context of a $700K estate, it’s the smallest line item by an order of magnitude.
Posts shown above are placeholder topics — actual journal content to be populated as we publish.
A short note when something changes.
No newsletter cadence, no marketing automation. One email when California probate law changes materially, when court fees move, or when a piece worth reading shows up on the journal. Unsubscribe in one click.