Notice of Continued Administration

A friend of ours just got a notification from her brother-in-law’s lawyer. That’s the brother-in-law who’s handling her late father’s estate. All it consists of, after Medicaid and the nursing homes, is one two family house. It’s been for sale since the old gentleman died a year ago.
Three or four years ago, I’m told, people were calling him and asking to buy it. They were offering more than twice what he owed on it. As a duplex it made a nice piece of income property or a home for a family with grandparents to take care of. It was in demand.
The lawyer’s typed note was simple and stark. (She showed it to me.) It reappointed the long-suffering brother-in-law for another year as executor of an unresolved estate (one house that won’t sell) and gave as its reason: “The estate remains under administration.
The continued administration is necessary because Primary estate asset is the real estate, which has been on the market since March of 2008. No offers have been received and the property remains for sale. Estimated time necessary to sell unknown.” Unknown, indeed.
Family members told the old gentleman to sell four years ago. They ran the numbers and showed him how he could use the proceeds to buy into and maintain an assisted living unit where his meals would be just down the hall; he could go on playing with his computer and his television.
But he refused. This house is my children’s inheritance, he insisted. Such an inheritance! If you want to inherit a pain in the derriere. They’re going ‘round and ‘round. Whether to rent it out (with all the grief that comes from being a petite landlord), whether to sell it for what you can get now—even at the risk of a deficiency judgment.
Properties like it are selling, the real estate agent explained to them. But nearly everything that’s moving in the Grand Rapids area is foreclosed property at fire sale prices. Why should a buyer pay more than what he can get it from a bank for?
Just one more example of the kind of grief that’s going around this country now. Even the dead can’t sell out and move on. In my neighborhood, forty miles or so from the above duplex, there was still some movement last spring.
People weren’t getting what they wanted, but they were able to pay off remaining mortgages and move to other jobs. One couple followed her job to Mississippi, another followed his to Texas. Another retired to their riverfront cottage nearby—they had hoped to get enough from their home to pay off the retirement home. That didn’t happen.
Another chap lost his job and got out before he owed any more. They moved in with her folks. Then, in mid-summer, the sales stopped. There were lots of For Sale signs up but no movement. Not far away there’s an empty house—two years old—he found work in Florida last fall. The snowplow used their driveway this winter to dump the snow from the cul-de-sac. No prospects were using it.
I haven’t seen a sale anywhere around here since June, at the latest. My friend’s brother-in-law off in suburban Grand Rapids had no desire to watch over a house for a year! But it has a mortgage and he has family members who’d like a few bucks out of it. He’d probably like some too.
Meanwhile, he’s working his tail off—I’m told—trying to preserve the company he works for in the auto parts supplier industry. They’re laying off like crazy, but he’s still there—making sales calls and holding the hands of surviving customers.
His future doesn’t look happy. Today’s figures on General Motors’ losses raise real questions how long it (or Chrysler) is going to be around to buy parts from anybody. I have friends around here in the same boat. It doesn’t matter how clever an engineer you are, there’s got to be a company in existence for you to create parts for.
Moving to a another job—assuming you find one—gets vastly more complicated when you cannot unload the house you’re in. Double that—become an executor of a second mortgaged house—and life becomes an unbelievable joy.
No wonder people are mailing in the keys. People used to do that—pack the Conestoga and move on West. Only now, they tell us, a lot of the “west” is even worse off than we are.
A “Notice of Continued Administration” would have been so unnecessary only a few short years ago.