About 340,000 homes were inherited in a year. Someone still has to pay for the roof.

Audrey Rutter and her sister inherited their childhood house in Tulsa in 2023, and they could not agree on it. Rutter was 32, just finished with a master's program in Chicago, looking for work and planning a wedding. Her sister wanted to rent the two-bedroom out.

"It wasn't a nice neighborhood," Rutter said, "but it did give us that sense of stability." Their mother had bought it for $38,000 in 1998 and later added central air and heat. After a breast-cancer diagnosis, the extra money went to medical bills, and the house went without much upkeep.

Neither sister could pay for the repairs. Neither could buy the other out. They sold to a company that flips houses, for $52,000, and Rutter let that price stand because it matched the block and the condition the house was in.

Her half paid for the wedding and carried her while she looked for a job in public housing policy. "Once we had the offer, though, I felt a lot of relief," she said. "I just wanted to sell it and be done with it."

The Washington Post published her account on Sunday, October 25, next to a much larger count. Cotality, the property-data firm formerly called CoreLogic, recorded about 340,000 inherited-home transfers in the 12 months ending August 2025. Ordinary resales were down, so those transfers were 7% of what the firm saw, the highest share it has published.

Matt Delventhal, a principal economist at Cotality, built the count from deed records. He told the trade publication Connect CRE that it does not separate a sale from a family that kept the house or moved in. The siblings are the ones left with that choice, and with the bills.

Peggy Sizow sees these houses from the estate side. She is chief fiduciary officer at National Advisors Trust Company, an independent trust company, and she used to draft estate plans as a lawyer in New Jersey. She told the Post that for many middle- and upper-class families, the home is the largest thing they own, and the one that shows up most often.

Keeping the name on a deed is not the same as paying for the house. Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, said some heirs find deferred property taxes the estate still owes. If that cash is missing, the house is what gets sold.

The same stretch of weeks can bring a roof leak, the power bill, and the cost of clearing out a parent's rooms. The Insurance Information Institute, the industry's research group, says a typical homeowners policy often limits coverage after a house sits empty for 30 to 60 days.

A mortgage stays on the house after the borrower dies, and someone still has to make the payment. The Garn-St. Germain Act, a 1982 federal law, generally keeps the lender from demanding the whole balance just because a relative inherited. The monthly payment is still owed.

A reverse mortgage works differently. Many of them come due when the last borrower dies or moves out for good.

Chrissy Burgess and her two siblings inherited an aunt's lake house in upstate New York and wanted to keep spending the Fourth of July there. The roof had a hole, the windows were broken, and bats and mice were inside. Three families could not fit at once.

Burgess lives in Brooklyn. Her siblings are in Philadelphia and Austin. She said the fight was over how much each person could put in, and whether paying more should mean a bigger share of the house and of the bills still coming.

They argued for years. A lawyer then wrote an agreement for who uses the house and who pays for the work. They built an addition so the three families can be there together, knowing a sale would probably not pay them back.

"It's a life disappointment to me that we're not physically closer," Burgess said. The house is how they still get everyone in one room.

Rutter's family needed a buyer because nobody could fund the wait. Burgess's family needed the weeks and the repairs written down because they had chosen to keep the place. While that argument is open, the house is already sending bills.

Someone has to cover the tax, the insurance, and the leak before anyone has agreed. Someone has to say who sleeps there, or who gets the holiday weeks, and whether that person pays the others for the use. If one sibling buys the others out, the family still needs a price, the cash, and a plan for any loan on the house.

In California, who moves in can change the tax bill itself. Proposition 13, passed in 1978, generally holds the yearly rise in a home's taxable value to no more than 2%. Proposition 19, passed in 2020, lets a child keep more of a parent's lower taxable value, and only if that child lives in the house as their own home.

The California State Board of Equalization, the state's property-tax board, sets how much of the old taxable value can pass to the child. On a transfer from February 16, 2025 through February 15, 2027, that amount is the home's current taxable value plus $1,044,586. Anything above that goes back on the bill, and the child has to file for a homeowners' exemption within a year.

Cotality counted nearly 60,000 inherited properties in California in that same year, 18% of the state's transfers, more than twice the new homes sold there. The sibling who moves in may get the smaller tax bill. A sibling living somewhere else does not, and filing does not put a new roof on the house.

A house in another country adds a second set of papers to the same argument. Sibling Dynamics When Parents Have Resources is what happens when siblings want different things from the same parents. Cross-Border Inheritance and Probate Awareness for Diaspora Families is which country controls the house.

Rutter felt the relief when a buyer showed up. Burgess got a summer the three families can still share. The bills had started for both of them before either ending was settled.