Inheriting a House With Siblings in Pennsylvania

We see this all the time. The real issue is the agent doesn't advocate for their client and sit down with the sibling or lead a group discussion, letting the executor deal with it. Sometimes having a professional simply walk the difficult sibling through the math, the data, the market, and consumer factors can go a long way. Plus, we don't have to sit across from them next year at Thanksgiving. When you chose an agent, pick one that will have the family meetings and be the mediator, not just stick a sign in the yard and leave it all up to you.

Your parents put you in charge because they trusted you, not your brother or sister. I'll be honest, when my Great Aunt passed, my cousin made decisions her brothers did not like or agree with and there was a lot of fighting, a period of not speaking, and then once everyone had time to get out of their feelings and process, all was fine. The goal is to try to avoid that.

This is where letting others take the brunt of it can help. We take the heat for you and push back, or using services for liquidation that take "you" out of it. Then if siblings feel they got a raw deal, they can blame the service companies and agents. We do both. We gladly take the heat. The tip is this, always phrase things as "The professionals recommend this and here is why, and that's what we are doing. You're not professionals nor am I in this space, so lets trust them to do what they can to get us the best result instead of us using opinions instead of facts and evidence."

Just like we have a fiduciary duty to our clients, you have a fiduciary duty to the person that made you the executor of their estate: to abide by their wishes with obedience. We know that can be hard sometimes because, even in real estate, some of our clients ask us to do things that we know are absolutely the wrong course of action or will cause issues. After we've explained to them the risks and the very likely potential of the outcome, if they still tell us to do it, we must obey.

Were you the enemy when you got a new bike and your sibling got a hand me down as kids or something similar?
Parents know their kids, and they picked you for a reason. They believed you could handle it, so now believe in yourself to. We realize we're repeating this, but it's true.

Also, if you have the power to veto, do it. The conflict you're probably having is involving pricing or some other thing. Do ask for feedback, opinions, and ideas so everyone feels included. Try, if you can, to incorporate a little bit of everybody's ideas, but at the end of the day, your parents trusted you to make the hard, tough, and right decision.

You've likely had fights with siblings before and all survived and will again. Speak to numbers, data, evidence - illustrate you made the decision based on that and not feeling.

All of the above can create financial havoc. Most estates do not have a ton of money or assets, some none. When in a situation where siblings have a vote in the decision, tis can be very troubling when one person doesn't get it. Every month there are carrying costs.

This happened to my best friend - twice. Perfect credit scores, nice savings, and two very different situations when each parent died that twice led him to have to file for personal bankruptcy. In one situatuion, the mother put everything in his name and died before the 5 year holding period ended. When his dad died, he'd taken out a reverse mortgage, had a brother that had equal say in the estate that went to jail - with the court deciding the house couldn't be sold while the brother's belongings were in it. It was a mess.