Probate and inherited property
Someone has died, and there is a house. Before it can be sold, somebody has to work out which of several quite different situations you are actually in, and nobody hands you that answer at the time. This is the plain version, with the El Dorado County specifics and a date on every figure.
The first question is not what the house is worth. It is whether a court has to be involved at all, and for a good number of families here the answer is no.
If the house was held in a living trust, the person named as successor trustee can usually sell it without opening a probate case. That is most of what trusts are for. If it was held in joint tenancy with a surviving spouse or another co-owner, title generally passes to the survivor outside probate. A transfer on death deed recorded before the death does something similar.
So before anyone calls an attorney or an agent, find the deed and find out whether there is a trust. Those two documents decide most of what follows.
California has shorter routes for smaller estates, and they were widened considerably in 2025.
For a home that was the decedent’s primary residence and is worth $750,000 or less, a Petition to Determine Succession to Real Property can take the place of a full probate. That threshold arrived with Assembly Bill 2016 and applies to deaths on or after 1 April 2025. Before that date the limit was $184,500, which almost nothing in El Dorado Hills ever met.
For personal property rather than real estate, bank accounts and the like, there is an affidavit procedure under Probate Code sections 13100 to 13116. The limit is $208,850 for deaths on or after 1 April 2025, and it is adjusted for inflation every three years.
Both routes require waiting at least forty days after the death. Neither is worth attempting on a guess, because the threshold is set by the value on the date of death and an appraisal is what decides it. Plenty of houses here will sit above $750,000, so this helps some families and not others. It is still worth checking before anyone assumes full probate is the only road.
Once a personal representative is appointed, the court grants authority under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. It comes in two strengths, and the difference decides how the house gets sold.
With full authority, the representative can sell much as any owner would, with no hearing to confirm it. What is required instead is a Notice of Proposed Action, Judicial Council form DE-165, sent to the beneficiaries at least fifteen days before the sale. If nobody objects inside that window, it proceeds.
With limited authority, the sale has to be confirmed by the court. That means a hearing, on a date the court sets, and it changes the shape of the whole transaction.
A confirmed sale is not a normal sale, and buyers who have never been through one are routinely surprised by it.
The accepted offer is not final. It is the opening bid. At the hearing, anyone qualified can bid against it in open court, and the house can go to somebody who had never set foot in it until that morning.
Because of that, these sales tend to be all cash or close to it, contingencies are thin on the ground, and the deposit is handled differently. A buyer who needs a loan and a long inspection period is at a real disadvantage. None of which is cause for despair. It is cause to price and market the house for the process it is actually in, rather than the one everybody assumes.
The minimum bid at the hearing is set by statute, not by anyone’s judgment. Probate Code section 10311 puts it at ten percent more on the first ten thousand dollars of the accepted offer, and five percent more on everything above ten thousand.
Worked through on a round number: if the accepted offer is $800,000, the first $10,000 becomes $11,000 and the remaining $790,000 becomes $829,500. So the first overbid has to be at least $840,500. After that the court takes bids in increments it sets on the day.
That formula is why the original offer matters more than it looks. A low accepted offer sets a low opening bid and invites the room in. Pricing a court confirmation sale is not the same exercise as pricing an ordinary listing.
This is the part that catches families hardest, and it is worth knowing before anybody decides whether to keep the house or sell it.
Before 2021, a child could inherit a parent’s California home and keep the parent’s Proposition 13 assessed value whatever they then did with it. Proposition 19 ended that for transfers on or after 16 February 2021.
The exclusion now applies only to a family home, only where it was the parent’s principal residence, and only where the child moves in as their own primary residence within one year of the transfer and claims the homeowners’ exemption. The Board of Equalization is blunt about the deadline: there is no exception to the one year move in requirement.
If no child moves in, the house is reassessed at market value. For a home bought in El Dorado Hills in the nineties and held ever since, that can multiply the annual property tax several times over. It is frequently the single number that decides whether a family keeps the house or sells it.
Where the child moves in and claims the exemption, the exclusion still is not unlimited. If the home’s market value at transfer exceeds the parent’s factored base year value plus an allowance, the excess is added on top of the old assessed value.
That allowance is adjusted for inflation every two years. It is $1,044,586 for transfers between 16 February 2025 and 15 February 2027. It was $1,022,600 for the two years before that, and $1,000,000 when Proposition 19 began.
The claim goes in on Form BOE-19-P, within three years of the transfer and before the property is passed to anyone else. The homeowners’ exemption runs on its own one year clock. Missing either is how people lose a benefit they genuinely qualified for.
Probate for somebody who lived in El Dorado Hills, Cameron Park, Shingle Springs or Placerville is heard in the El Dorado County Superior Court, in Departments 4, 8 and 9. Filings go to the Cameron Park branch at 2927 Meder Road, the Placerville Building C branch at 2850 Fairlane Court, or the South Lake Tahoe branch at 1354 Johnson Boulevard.
One thing that catches people out: whoever is holding the original will has thirty days from learning of the death to lodge it with the court, under Probate Code section 8200. That clock starts whether or not anybody has decided what to do yet.
Longer than anyone tells you at the beginning.
The first hearing is usually set thirty to forty five days after the petition is filed, and letters are generally issued at that hearing if nobody objects. The creditor claim period is four months and it is not optional, under Probate Code section 9100. The inventory and appraisal is due within four months of appointment.
From filing to final distribution, twelve to eighteen months is the normal range. A simple estate with everybody cooperating can finish in nine to twelve. Anything contested runs longer, occasionally for years.
The house can usually be sold well before the case closes. But a buyer asking for a thirty day close needs to understand which part of that timeline they are standing in.
I was a licensed appraiser before I ever sold a house, so I know what the estate’s valuation is going to turn on and I can tell you in advance.
What I will not do is be both. An estate needs a date of death valuation, and it needs to be independent of whoever is selling the property. Mixing those two roles is not in your interest and I will not pretend otherwise. What I can do is tell you what the probate referee is going to be looking at, so nothing in that report arrives as a surprise.
Every family underestimates this and none of them are wrong to. A home somebody lived in for thirty years is not a logistics problem. It is forty cupboards and a great many decisions, made by people who are already tired.
There is no deadline on that from me. Where the estate’s own timeline allows it, taking it in order and in sections is kinder, and it usually produces a better sale anyway. The declutter checklist below was written for exactly this. It is free and there is no email wall on it.
This is general information. It is not legal advice and it is not tax advice. I am a broker, not an attorney and not an accountant, and a probate sale is one of the few transactions where you genuinely need both.
Every threshold and dollar figure on this page carries its date because these numbers move. Confirm them against the California Probate Code and the Board of Equalization before you rely on any of them, and take the specifics of your own situation to a probate attorney.
What I can tell you is what the house is worth, what the process will do to the way it has to be sold, and what the realistic timeline looks like. Then you walk into the attorney’s office already knowing the right questions.
If you are at the start of this and you do not yet know whether you are in a trust sale or a probate, send me the address. I will tell you what I can see from the record and what the house would be worth either way. If what you actually need is an attorney rather than an agent, I will say so.
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No contract, no obligation, and no pressure to be further along than you are. Plenty of people write to me a year before they are ready, and that is genuinely the right time to write.
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