they’ve been lived in for a long time and maintenance may have been neglected. Elderly homeowners don’t always maintain their homes. A home that was pristine when your parents moved into it in 1965 and was last updated in the 1980s will need attention prior to marketing. It makes things difficult for the heirs when things like heating, plumbing, septic systems, and carpets are outdated and need updating. A pending sale of a house might not go through if, after inspecting the house, an oil tank is leaking underground and needs to be repaired. In such circumstances, you might have to sell the house at a much lower price to compensate for the maintenance issues and concerns. This may require an inspector who will recommend repairs for both current and potential threats before selling the house. Hiring an inspector can be, like everything else, both time and resource-intensive, especially for heirs who live far from the inherited home. Once the necessary repairs and updates are made on the inherited home, you might calculate the total expenses and discover that an inordinate amount of money has been invested. This will have a major effect on trying to sell the house. The seller can’t reasonably afford to sell below the market value of the home, plus the value of the repairs and updates they’ve had to install. This may cause the heir to hike the price of the property unrealistically, though, in an effort to recover the expenses incurred by trying to make the home salable—making its sale difficult, if not impossible. The sale of a property like this can be difficult because it must be priced more expensively to compensate for the higher cost of sale preparations, only for the price to become a barrier to potential buyers, causing the property to take longer to sell.
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