Inheriting a House and Selling It in St Louis
Dan: Hello. This is Dan Stratford. I’m with the C1 Partners. We are here today with Bryan Schroeder, who is the owner/operator of FasterHouse Real Estate. FasterHouse serves the St. Louis, Missouri metro area. One of their specialties is helping people sell a home that they have inherited when they need to sell it quickly. Of course, in many situations where people need to sell a home fast, FasterHouse can help.
Bryan, there’s been a lot of articles published recently about people inheriting homes and needing to figure out what their best options are for dealing with an inherited home, renting it, should they try to sell it, fix it up, all these kinds of things. We’re going to, we’d love to get your expertise and your insight on this matter. To start off with, when you meet people who’ve inherited a house, what are some of the challenges that they face?
Bryan: They’re quite often overwhelmed. Not only did they inherit a house but they recently lost one of their parents, so it’s kind of an emotional time. They’re kind of overwhelmed. They’ve got bank accounts and cars and a lot of other things that they’re dealing with in addition to the house, so they’re very overwhelmed.
What, basically, they’re taking on is almost like a second full-time job. They probably already have busy lives that they’re doing themselves. Getting rid of this house and figuring out all their parents’ financing and stuff is almost like another full-time job. They’re very overwhelmed in trying to figure out what to do.
What happens very often with a house that they inherited is their parents had lived there for a long time. Especially when people are older and have lived in a house for a long time, it hasn’t been updated for a long time. It could be 20-30 years that the carpet’s been in the house or the kitchen cabinets or the roof, whatever. It needs work. They’re overwhelmed about that. If they’re thinking about selling it, they have a real estate agent that’s kind of encouraging them to spruce the house up, and sometimes they’ll do that, but quite often they just don’t have the time or the money or whatever.
The other thing is the house, very often, is full of stuff, especially the folks that were from the depression era. They just didn’t get rid of anything. There’s tons of clothes and paperwork, furniture, from years and years and years that needs to be disposed of, needs to be gone through to see … Quite often they’re wondering if there’s something valuable in there, so they’re kind of searching through all that.
To sum it up, there’s a lot of stuff that they have going on at that time and they’re kind of overwhelmed.
Dan: What are some of the biggest challenges they face if they decide, hey, we need to sell this house?
Bryan: Kind of like I just said, it’s kind of deciding which way to go and getting going. One of the first challenges they have is getting the house cleaned up and ready to sell. It often has a lot of furnishings or belongings in the house that they need to do something with. We do work with some auctioneers or some organizations that can come by and determine whether there’s anything of value in the house and move it out, get it either to somewhere that they can sell it or donate it to a charity or whatever, then help just get rid of everything else that doesn’t have any value. Just determining if they’re going to sell it as is or if they’re going to spruce it up and list it.
Dan: One thing you said that was interesting there, Bryan, is it sounds like you’re more than just a buying house company. If someone’s inherited a house and they’re going through this struggle, it sounds like you have a lot of other ways and resources to kind of guide them or consult them in the right direction for help cleaning up the house, figuring out what to do with the stuff in the house, determining if it’s junk or valuable. Is that the case?
Bryan: Yeah, that’s very much the case. What we try to do is we try to meet with people and see what they’re wanting to do and what resources that we have that can be a help for them. We’ve been doing this for well over ten years. When I got into this business, I figured out one of the needs out there is for folks that inherit a house on how to get it sold, so that’s one of the niches we’ve kind of developed in our business.
Dan: That’s just wonderful information. I really appreciate it. We’re going to pause this interview for new and we’re going to have another segment coming up that we’ll post soon. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Bryan Schroeder and FasterHouse you can go to fasterhouse.com and learn all about them and see if they can help you. Thanks a lot, Bryan. We’ll talk to you again soon.
Bryan: Thanks.
If you have inherited a house in St. Louis and need to sell it please call us at 314-926-0660 or fill out this form
