Lexington County probate sits in the Judicial Center at 205 East Main Street, on the corner of Main and South Lake, and in our experience it moves at a reasonable pace once someone actually files. The delay is almost never the court. It is the six months before anybody goes. A house in Shoal Creek or off Old Cherokee Road sits empty through a Lexington summer, the lawn gets away from the family, a neighbour starts calling the county, and the taxes keep accruing toward that November sale date at Barr Road. Meanwhile the siblings are having the same conversation every few weeks without anyone being appointed to act. If you take one thing from this page: the appointment at 205 East Main is the unlock, and it is worth doing before you have decided anything about selling. We have walked away from Lexington houses we wanted to buy purely because the estate was never opened and there was nobody with authority to sign a deed. That is a solvable problem, but not one a buyer can solve for you. A few things specific to Lexington worth knowing before you call anyone. Much of the housing around Lake Murray and out toward Chapin was bought by the same families in the seventies and eighties, which means a lot of current estates involve houses held for forty years with no mortgage and no recent survey. That is good news for equity and bad news for speed: old deeds throw up boundary questions, and a house that has never changed hands since it was built often has no clean record of the septic or the well. We buy those anyway, but we would rather find out at the start than three weeks before closing. Second, Lexington's market strength works against inherited property in a way people do not expect. Because tidy houses here sell in about a month, an agent will usually tell you to list, spend money on paint and carpet and get top dollar. That advice is correct for a house someone has been living in. For a house that has sat empty since a funeral, with a roof at the end of its life and a kitchen from 1988, the repair bill to make it list-ready routinely runs past what the extra sale price returns — and you are fronting that money on a house you did not want and cannot insure properly while it is vacant.
Nothing sells until the estate is open
This is the part that catches families out, and it is the same every time.
When someone dies owning a house in Lexington County, nobody can
sign a deed for it until the estate has been opened at the
Lexington County Probate Court, 205 East Main Street, Suite 134, Lexington, SC 29072 and someone has
been appointed with authority to act. Not the eldest child, not whoever has
the keys, not whoever has been paying the taxes. Until that appointment
exists, there is no seller — and no buyer of any kind, cash or financed,
can close.
What that means in practice
If you are ringing us about a parent's house in Lexington, the first
genuinely useful question is not what it is worth. It is whether anyone has
been to the Lexington County Probate Court yet. If the answer is no, that is the next
step, and it is one we cannot take for you — we are a buyer, not your
lawyer. If the answer is yes and there is a personal representative
appointed, we can usually move quickly from there.
Why inherited houses suit a cash sale
An inherited house in Lexington is usually empty, usually behind on
maintenance, and usually costing somebody money every month in taxes and
insurance while the family works out what to do. The local market runs
about 34 days to contract at a median near
$368,000 — but that is for a house that shows
well. An empty house with a dated kitchen and a roof a lender will question
does not sell in 34 days. It sits, and the carrying
costs keep running.
Multiple heirs
Where there are several siblings, everyone with an interest has to agree to
sell and sign. We would rather know that up front than three weeks in. If
one heir is out of state — common in Lexington — that is workable, but
it adds time, and time is the thing an empty house does not have much of.
Deeds for Lexington County are recorded at the
Lexington County Register of Deeds, 212 South Lake Drive, Suite 301, Lexington, SC 29072.