Hey, guys. It’s Brad, here, with Arbor View Properties. Arbor View Properties is a house buying company out of North Metro Atlanta. Appreciate you checking out our video today. I want to do a quick video today. And this is a question that we see some from time to time, is how long does probate take? We do buy a lot of houses from people that are going through the probate process that have inherited a house. They just don’t want to deal with the house anymore. They just need to sell it. Maybe it just has too many memories and they don’t want to be in the house because of the memories. And some people like the memories, some people don’t. It just depends on the situation.
So, whenever someone passes away and they have assets they need to sell, in most cases that is going to have to go through the probate process. It’s always going to have to go through the probate court in order to get authorization to sell the assets, especially in most cases, most of the time there’s a house involved. That’s why people open probate, and they want to sell this house. Now there could be other assets involved.
But how long does it take? At a minimum, I would give yourself four to five weeks. If you’re on the ball with everything and you’ve got all your ducks in a row, four to five weeks. I would recommend reaching out to a probate attorney. If you need a referral to a good probate attorney, we can refer you to some probate attorneys in the area, depending on what part of Atlanta you live in, that way you’re not driving all over town. But an attorney is going to make it easier for you because they’ve been through this a hundred times. You’ve probably never been through it before. And they’re going to know what paperwork to file, and when to file it, and where to file it, and what to do. They’re the experts on it. It’s worth paying them a little bit of money to handle that for you.
That’s not to say that you can’t do it by yourself. You could research online and you could get all the documents. We’ll put a link below to a resource page where you can actually get a lot of the State of Georgia probate documents. And also each county sometimes has specific documents for the county and they’ll have those on their website, on their probate page for the probate court. You can absolutely do it yourself. We have purchased houses from people who have done the probate process themselves and not gone through an attorney. It’s just a matter of how much time and effort are you willing to put into it. If you don’t have a lot of time and effort or expertise, you should probably just have an attorney help you with it.
But yeah, four to five weeks at a minimum. A lot of times this five weeks thing here, depending on if there’s creditors owed and whatnot, you actually do have to publish an ad in whatever the county’s local newspaper is to say, hey, so-and-so passed away and any creditors can come claim any money that’s owed to them. And that has to actually run in the particular publication for, I believe it’s five weeks. So that’s why I said four to five weeks there.
Honestly, with a lot of the deals we’ve done, a lot of them take between six and eight weeks. You’re going to file some documents and the court has to process them. For example, we had a deal that was supposed to close two weeks ago, and right before closing, they had determined that one of the documents needed to be revised and refiled. So the family had to go through that and they had to revise that document and refile it. And one of the heirs lived in a different state, so the documents had to be FedExed and FedExed back, and it took a little bit of time. So it’s going to be probably, hopefully within the next week or two, we’re going to be able to close that transaction again.
But that happens. We’ve had some probate deals we’ve purchased in the past where we thought we had everything done, and then the probate court, there was one where the probate court totally just didn’t do their job, and the individual had to refile probate all over again and go through the entire process all over again. It was so frustrating for her and I felt so bad for her, but unfortunately it is what it is. She had to do that.
But yeah, give yourself, I would say four to six weeks, really, four to five weeks minimum, and then make sure you consult an attorney about it if you can. I do recommend that. It makes it a little bit easier. Does it cost you money? Yes, but it makes it a little bit easier.
If you have general questions for us, again, we’re not attorneys, we’re always going to defer you to an attorney, but we’ve done enough of these where we have some experience and we kind of know some of the things to expect. So if you do have questions, feel free to call us. If it’s something that we need to refer you to an attorney to, we’ll absolutely do that.
So, I hope this helps you. The probate process can take some time. You just need to be patient. After all, you are dealing with the government, and as we all know, the government can be very slow and bureaucratic with things and don’t have the most efficient systems and processes. So just go into it with that expectation that you are dealing with the government. Everyone has gone down to the DMV and had to get their driver’s license. They’ve improved it a lot over the years, but it can take time, so just be patient and be prepared.
So I hope this helps. Thanks for checking out our video. If you do have a house you want to sell that you’re going through in probate, we’d love to buy it from you. You can fill out the form on our website. There’s a link below on our website, or you can call us at (770) 810-5715. Thanks, guys. Again, my name is Brad, with Arbor View Properties. I hope you have a great day. Thank you.