Georgia heirs property law: who inherits, and how to sell your share

Heirs property is a home that passes down with no will. The owner dies. The house then goes to the family by law, not by a deed with one clear name on it. Soon a lot of people own one home at once. This page is the deep guide to how that works in Georgia. It also lands on the part you came for: you can sell your own share, on your own.

Start here if this is all new

If this is your first look, read the short version first. Our page on heir property in Georgia covers what it is and how to get out. It is the quick orientation.

This guide goes deeper. It walks through the actual law. Who inherits with no will. Why one house ends up with six owners. What the Partition Act does. How a title gap gets bridged. We keep it in plain words, one step at a time.

Who inherits a house with no will in Georgia

When a person dies with no will, the state has a set order. The law calls it intestate succession. (O.C.G.A. § 53-2-1.) It decides who gets the house.

None of this applies if there was a valid will. A will names who gets the land, and that controls. The order below only kicks in when there is no will at all.

Start with the spouse. A spouse with no kids takes it all. That case is simple. One heir, one owner.

Now add kids. A spouse and children split the house. The spouse and each child take an equal share. But there is a floor. The spouse never gets less than one third. That floor matters when there are a lot of kids.

Here is the math, step by step. Say a wife and one child inherit. That is two people. They each take half. Now say a wife and three kids inherit. That is four people. An even split would be one fourth each. But the spouse floor is one third. So the wife takes one third. The three kids then split the rest.

What if there is no spouse at all? Then the kids take the whole house, in equal shares. If a child died before the parent, that child is not skipped. Their own kids step in and split the part their parent would have had. The law calls this per stirpes. It just means a share flows down a branch of the family.

What if there is no spouse and no kids? The law keeps going down the line. Parents come next. Then siblings. Then grandparents. After that come the aunts and uncles. Each rung shares alike. The house never goes to the state as long as some blood relative is alive to take it.

You can see why this gets messy fast. One death can name four or five heirs at once. A second death, a generation later, can turn four heirs into twelve.

How the whole family ends up on the title

Here is the part that traps people. In Georgia, the house passes at the very moment of death. Title goes straight to the heirs. No one has to sign a thing. No deed has to change hands first. It is automatic.

The estate can still owe money. Debts and taxes get paid out of the estate. But the heirs hold title from day one. Their names may not be on any deed yet, and they still own it.

So if four kids inherit, all four own the house the day the parent dies. That is why one home ends up with three or four or six owners. No one chose this on purpose. The law did it for them the moment the owner passed.

This is the root of the heirs property problem. Many owners. One house. No single person in charge.

Tenants in common: your share is your own

When many people own one house, the law gives them a name. They are tenants in common. It is a plain idea. Each person owns a share of the whole. No one owns a set room or a back bedroom. You each own an undivided part of all of it.

Here is the key fact, and most people miss it. Each owner can sell their own share. You do not need the others to agree. You do not need them to sign. You do not even have to tell them, though some people choose to.

The Georgia Heirs Property Law Center says it plainly: “Each heir may transfer his or her interest in the property to another heir or to an outsider.” You can read that on their site at gaheirsproperty.org.

There is one limit worth knowing. No single owner can sell the whole house alone. That takes every owner. But your slice of it? That part is yours to sell.

This is the spine of what we do. We buy one heir’s share at a time. If you want the full walk-through of that, see how to sell your share of an inherited house.

The law that protects heirs: the Partition Act

Sometimes one heir wants out and the rest will not budge. That heir has a legal tool. They can ask a court to split the house or sell it. This court case is called a partition action.

For years, these sales were harsh. A judge would order the home to a fast auction. It sold cheap. The family lost a chunk of its value in a single afternoon.

Georgia changed that. The state passed the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act. (O.C.G.A. § 44-6-180.) It guards families caught in this spot. Here is how it works, in plain terms.

What counts as heirs property under the Act? There is a test. The owners must hold the house as tenants in common. No signed deal binds them all to a sale. And a good part of the house is held by family, or came down through family. If the home fits that test, these extra guards kick in.

First, the court checks if the house passes that test. If it does, the court gets a fair price. It brings in a neutral appraiser, licensed by the state, to set the value. (O.C.G.A. § 44-6-184.) No one just guesses.

Next comes the buyout right. The heirs who did not ask to sell get first crack. They can buy out the share of the heir who wants to leave. The price is the one that appraiser set. It is your slice of the full home value, not a lowball.

Last, if no heir buys the share, the court leans to a normal sale on the open market. Not a rushed courthouse auction. An open sale tends to get the family far more money.

So the Act is a shield. It slows a forced sale and sets a fair price. That is real protection. But keep this in mind. It is still a court case. It still costs money. It still takes time, often many months. There is a simpler path than court. See the alternative to a partition action.

The affidavit of heirship: a bridge for the title

Many families never open probate. The house just sits in a dead parent’s name for years. When it comes time to sell, the title has a gap. Who are the legal heirs? An affidavit of heirship is one way to fill that gap.

It is a sworn statement. It names the person who died. It lists their heirs and how each one is related. Two witnesses sign it. They must know the family well, but stand to gain nothing from the estate. Then the paper gets recorded with the county.

Here is the catch, and it is a big one. The affidavit is not the last word. A title company still decides on its own whether it will accept the paper. Often they want more. A death record. A clean chain of heirs. Sometimes full probate after all. So the affidavit can help, but it does not settle the title by itself.

We deal with this a lot. When the deed is still in a deceased parent’s name, that is a title job we take on after we buy your share. You do not have to fix it first.

Year’s support: Georgia’s quiet shortcut

This one is worth knowing, because most families never hear about it. Georgia lets a surviving spouse or a minor child ask the probate court to set aside property to live on for the year after a death. (O.C.G.A. § 53-3-1.) It is called year’s support. A house counts.

When the court grants it, the house passes to that spouse or those children ahead of most debts the estate owed. There is no long administration and no administrator— the person a court names to run an estate when there is no will. (With a will, that person is the executor.) In Georgia, year’s support often beats regular probate on both speed and cost.

The limits are real, so read them twice. It is only for a surviving spouse and minor children, so grown children on their own do not qualify. The petition has to be filed within two years of the death. A mortgage does not go away — year’s support outranks most debts, but not a loan secured by the house itself. And it changes who ends up owning the place, so the rest of the family should understand it before anyone files.

What clouds an heir-property title

A cloud is a snag on the title. It blocks a clean sale. Heir property tends to gather a few of them over time. Here are the common ones, one by one.

• The deed still names the dead owner. No one ever moved the title to the heirs. On paper, a person who has been gone for years still owns the house.
• An heir is missing. A cousin moved away long ago and no one can find them. Their share is real, and their signature is nowhere to be found.
• Back taxes piled up. The county wants its money. A tax lien for back taxes now sits on the house. If the taxes go unpaid long enough, the county can push the home toward a tax sale. Our Georgia tax sale guide walks through that clock and how it runs.
• An old lien lingers. A loan or a court judgment from years back was never cleared off the record. Some of these are already dead and some still bite — we sort that out on old liens on inherited property.

Any one of these can stop a closing. If a sale has already fallen through, or a title company has told you it will not write a policy, start with selling a house with a cloud on title.

Each cloud makes the house hard to sell on the open market. And each one is also why the price drops. A buyer who can clear the cloud earns that discount. That gap is the exact thing we know how to cure.

When the family agrees, you do not need us

Be honest with yourself first. Is the whole family on the same page? Does everyone want to sell? Then you do not need us at all. List the house with a good agent. Sell it on the open market. Split the money. That path pays the most, and it is the right call.

We are built for the other case. The family is stuck. One heir will not talk. One lives in the house and will not move. You want your share turned into cash, and a court fight is off the table.

That is the exact spot we work in. If a sibling won’t sell the inherited house, or one heir flat out refuses, you still have a move. You sell your own share. They keep theirs. No one has to lose their home.

How selling your share actually works

You do not clean up the title first. That is our job, not yours. Here is the flow, start to end.

You tell us about the house. Just the address, and a rough idea of who else is on it. No papers needed to start.

We pull the title and map the heir tree. We do this quietly, on our side. No one else in the family gets a call from us.

We send you a written offer. Plain terms, no tricks. You take it home and think it over for as long as you need.

You say yes, and we close. We draw the deed and wire your cash. About 30 days for a clean title. Longer, 60 to 120 days, if the title needs cure work first.

We are not the top dollar offer, and we say so. We are the one that closes with no family meeting. If the title is messy, that becomes our problem to solve. Some heirs also want a quiet title done on heir property, and we can handle that too.

We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice. Talk to a probate lawyer as well if you want. We are glad to be one call among a few. And if you would rather look at how to sell before probate wraps up, we can walk through that too.