Buying Property From an Estate Abroad: How Sales From Heirs Work

Published on: August 26, 2026

Last verified: 26 August 2026. Succession law, inheritance tax and registration procedure differ by country and often by region, and they change.

Quick answer:
Three things must be true before an estate can sell at all: the heirs identified by a document a registry will accept, the inheritance formally accepted, and the transfer from the deceased to the heirs registered.
All three are commonly missing when the property is first listed, because families often list to find out what it is worth rather than because they are ready to sell.
Selling the property itself normally requires unanimity among the co-heirs in civil-law systems. One holdout is enough to stop the deal.
The European Certificate of Succession proves heir status across EU member states without a fresh national procedure, which is what keeps a cross-border file moving.
Condition the offer, hold the deposit properly, and set a longstop date. A properly conditioned offer on an estate property is not a gamble; an unconditional one is.

Most guides to buying abroad assume there is a seller. One owner, one signature, one decision. A large share of the older housing stock in Europe and Latin America is not sold that way. It is sold by an estate: the previous owner has died, the property has passed to two or more heirs, and the person showing you around is one voice among several.

These sales look identical to any other listing on a portal. The photographs are the same, the asking price is often lower, and the agent may not volunteer the situation until you make an offer. The difference only shows up later, when the paperwork has to be produced, and by then you may have paid a deposit and booked flights.

This guide explains what changes when the seller is an estate, what the sequence looks like in the main civil-law markets foreign buyers actually shop in, and the specific checks that separate a good estate purchase from a two-year stalemate.

Why an estate sale is a different transaction

In an ordinary sale, the person on the title deed can sell. In an estate sale, three things have to be true before anyone can sell at all:

The heirs have to be identified. Not assumed, not "we all know it's the three of us", but established by a formal document that a notary or registry will accept.
The heirs have to have accepted the inheritance. In most civil-law systems, inheritance is not automatic in the practical sense. It has to be accepted, and until it is, the heirs are not yet in a position to transfer anything.
The transfer to the heirs has to be registered. The land registry still shows the deceased. Somebody has to move the title from the dead person to the living ones before it can move again to you.

Any one of those three can be missing. All three are commonly missing at the moment a property is first listed, because the family lists it to find out what it is worth, not because they are ready to sell.

The practical consequence: an estate property may be genuinely for sale, or it may be six months and several thousand euros of paperwork away from being sellable, and from the outside those two situations look the same.

The four questions to ask before you offer

Ask these in writing, to the agent and then to your own lawyer. If the agent cannot answer them, that is itself the answer.

Who legally owns it today? Ask for the current land registry extract. If it still shows the deceased, the estate has not been settled. That is normal but it means work is outstanding.

Have all the heirs accepted, and is that documented? Acceptance is not the same as agreeing to sell. In some systems, signing a sale is itself treated as an implied acceptance, which creates its own problems if the estate has debts.

Does everyone agree to sell, at this price? Selling the property itself normally requires unanimity in civil-law co-ownership. One holdout, including a minor represented by a guardian or an heir who has emigrated and stopped answering, is enough to stop the deal.

Could anyone else appear? Unknown children, an heir who renounced but whose renunciation was never properly filed, a will discovered later, a creditor of the estate. This is the risk that a good local lawyer is genuinely earning their fee to close off.

How it works country by country

The vocabulary changes but the shape is remarkably consistent.

Italy

Heirs file a dichiarazione di successione with the tax authority, generally within twelve months of the death, and pay the inheritance and cadastral taxes. The voltura catastale then updates the cadastre.

Until the estate is divided, the property sits in comunione ereditaria, undivided co-ownership among the co-heirs. Selling the house itself requires all of them.

Two Italian details matter to a foreign buyer:

Acceptance has to be traceable in the registry. Where an heir has accepted only tacitly, by behaving as owner rather than by signing a formal acceptance, the notary handling your purchase will normally have the tacit acceptance transcribed at the time of the deed. This is what protects you from the "apparent heir" problem, where someone who appeared to be the owner turns out not to have been.
The co-heir pre-emption right (Article 732 of the Civil Code) applies when a co-heir sells their share of the estate as a whole to an outsider. The other co-heirs must be notified with the price and have two months to match it; if they are not notified, they can later reclaim the share from the buyer. Italian case law is clear that this right attaches to the inheritance share, not to the sale of a specific identified property, but the distinction is technical and it is exactly the kind of thing worth a written opinion rather than an agent's reassurance.

France

The notary issues an acte de notoriété establishing who the heirs are, then an attestation immobilière (sometimes called attestation de propriété) publishing the transfer of the property to them at the land registry.

Until the estate is divided, the heirs hold the property in indivision. Under the Civil Code, day-to-day administration can be taken by heirs holding at least two-thirds of the undivided rights, but selling the property is an act of disposal and requires unanimity (Article 815-3).

There is an escape valve. Under Article 815-5-1, co-owners representing at least two-thirds of the rights can declare their intention to sell before a notary; the notary notifies the others, who have three months to object, and the court can then authorise the sale if it does not unduly harm the minority. It works, but it is a court process with its own timetable, and it is not something to discover after you have signed a compromis.

Also worth knowing: an heir who was living in the property as their principal residence at the time of the death can ask to be allotted the property in the division (attribution préférentielle). If such a person exists and is one of your "sellers", the deal has a dimension the agent may not have mentioned.

Spain

The heirs sign an escritura de aceptación y adjudicación de herencia before a notary, supported by the death certificate, the certificate from the register of last wills, and the will or declaration of heirs.

The practical bottleneck is Impuesto sobre Sucesiones y Donaciones. It is generally due within six months of the death, with an extension available if applied for in time, and it is administered by the autonomous community, so the bill in Andalusia and the bill in Asturias for identical estates can differ by a wide margin. The registry will not record the transfer until the tax position is settled. An estate that has let the deadline pass is carrying surcharges and interest, and that debt sits between you and a clean title.

Portugal

Habilitação de herdeiros establishes the heirs, and a cabeça-de-casal (head of the estate, usually the surviving spouse or eldest heir) administers it. Inheritance itself is taxed through Imposto do Selo, with spouses, descendants and ascendants exempt and other heirs generally paying at 10 percent. An estate passing sideways to nieces, nephews or cousins therefore has a real tax cost attached to it, and that cost sometimes explains why a property has sat unsold for years.

Greece

Heirs sign an acceptance deed which is then registered. The window to renounce an inheritance is short, measured in months, and is extended where the heir or the deceased was resident abroad. Registration runs through the Land Registry or the national cadastre (Ktimatologio), and in areas where cadastral registration is still being completed, the boundary and title records of an old rural property can need work of their own before anything can be sold.

Croatia

Estates go through the ostavinski postupak, a probate procedure conducted by a court or a notary acting for the court, ending in a rješenje o nasljeđivanju (decision on inheritance). Until that decision is final and recorded, the land register still shows the deceased.

Turkey

Heirs obtain a mirasçılık belgesi (certificate of inheritance, also called veraset ilamı) and then register the transfer. Note the distinction between iştirak halinde mülkiyet (joint ownership of the whole, where all heirs must act together) and müşterek mülkiyet (ownership in defined shares, where an individual share can be dealt with separately). Which one applies changes what a single heir can and cannot sign.

England, Wales and the United States

Common-law systems handle this through probate. A personal representative, either an executor named in the will or an administrator appointed by the court, takes a grant of representation and sells in that capacity. Listings are often openly marked "subject to probate".

In some US states, notably California, probate sales can also involve court confirmation and overbidding: your accepted offer can be topped in open court on the confirmation date. If you are bidding on a probate property in the US, ask specifically whether the sale is a full-authority or court-confirmed sale, because the difference determines whether your accepted offer is actually yours.

The EU tool that makes cross-border estates workable

If the deceased died on or after 17 August 2015 and the estate touches more than one EU member state, Regulation (EU) 650/2012 generally applies. Two features matter to you as a buyer.

First, it establishes a single applicable succession law, normally that of the deceased's habitual residence at death, with the option for the deceased to have chosen the law of their nationality in a will. That determines who the heirs are and what shares they take.

Second, it creates the European Certificate of Succession, a document issued in one member state that proves heir status in the others without a fresh national procedure. If you are buying a Spanish apartment from the German heirs of a Belgian resident, this is the document that keeps the file moving. Denmark and Ireland are outside the regulation.

Forced heirship: the risk that survives the sale

Most civil-law countries reserve a portion of an estate for children and sometimes a spouse. If the deceased gave away or willed property in a way that cuts into that reserved portion, an heir may have a claim.

The important question for a buyer is whether that claim can ever reach the property in your hands, or only the money in the other heirs' hands. In France, reforms have moved the system toward compensation in value rather than recovery of the asset itself, but the position depends on the facts and on what the property's own history contains.

That history is the thing to check. In Italy, for example, a property that came into the estate by way of a gift (provenienza donativa) rather than by purchase carries a well-known marketability problem: for a period after the donor's death, an heir whose reserved share was infringed may in principle act against the property. Italian notaries know this, banks know it, and it is a standard reason for a lender to decline a mortgage. Ask what the property's chain of title looks like going back at least twenty years, not just who owns it now.

Practical checklist before you commit money

Current land registry extract, showing whether the title still stands in the deceased's name
Death certificate and the will, or the formal declaration of heirs where there is no will
The document that establishes heir status: acte de notoriété, escritura de herencia, habilitação, rješenje, mirasçılık belgesi, grant of probate, or a European Certificate of Succession
Written confirmation that inheritance tax has been declared and paid, or an explicit plan and timetable for it
Proof that the transfer to the heirs has been, or will be, registered before your deed
A signed list of every heir, with confirmation that none is a minor or under guardianship (if any is, court approval is usually needed and it adds months)
Powers of attorney for any heir who will not attend in person, in the correct notarial and apostilled form
Confirmation of whether any co-heir has a pre-emption right and, if so, that the notification has been made correctly
A search for estate debts, mortgages and tax liens attaching to the property
Confirmation of who has been living in the property, and on what basis
Utility and service-charge arrears, which in estates are frequently years deep
Where relevant, twenty-plus years of title history to check for gifts, partial divisions or prior estate transfers

How to structure the offer

Three provisions do most of the protective work.

Make completion conditional. Your offer should be expressly conditional on the estate being registered in the heirs' names, all inheritance taxes paid, and every heir signing. A condition precedent is much stronger than an assurance.

Hold the deposit properly. Deposit money in an estate sale should sit with the notary, the lawyer's client account, or an equivalent regulated escrow, never with a family member. If the deal collapses because the heirs cannot deliver title, you want your money in an account that returns it automatically.

Put a longstop date in. Estate sales run late by their nature. Agree a date after which you can walk away with your deposit and, ideally, be reimbursed for wasted costs. Without one, "we are almost there" can go on for a very long time.

Is it worth it?

Often, yes. Estate properties are frequently priced below comparable stock, for reasons that have nothing to do with the building: several owners who want cash rather than a house, a family living in another country, years of deferred maintenance, and a sale process that has already deterred two or three previous buyers.

The discount is real, and so is the reason for it. What you are being paid for is patience and legal work, not risk. A properly conditioned offer on an estate property is not a gamble. An unconditional one is.

Frequently asked questions

Can I buy from just one heir?
You can sometimes buy that heir's undivided share, which is a very different thing from buying the property. You would become a co-owner alongside the others, with no right to occupy alone and no easy exit. Some markets also give the other co-heirs a right to buy that share first or to reclaim it from you afterwards. In almost all cases, what you actually want is a sale by all of them.

How long does an estate sale take?
If the estate is already settled and registered, it can complete on a normal timetable. If it is not, add the time to obtain the heirship documents, file and pay the inheritance tax, and register the transfer. Depending on the country and the family, that is realistically three months to over a year, and longer if an heir has to be traced or a court has to be involved.

Who pays the inheritance tax, me or them?
The heirs. It is their tax and it arises from the death, not from your purchase. What matters to you is that it is actually paid, because in several countries the registry will not complete the transfer until it is.

Are probate properties cheaper?
Frequently, but not automatically. The discount reflects condition, complexity and the sellers' desire for speed. Get an independent valuation rather than assuming that "probate" and "bargain" are the same word.

Do I need a local lawyer if a notary is already involved?
Yes. In civil-law systems the notary is a neutral public officer who ensures the deed is valid; the notary is not your advisor and does not negotiate for you. In an estate sale, where the questions are about who can sign and what claims survive, a lawyer acting only for you is the single best line of your budget.

Keep reading on JanusHermes

The discount on an estate property is paid for with patience and legal work, so the sequence matters: establish who can legally sign before you agree a price, and make completion conditional on the estate actually being registered in the heirs' names. JanusHermes lists property from local agencies in 11 languages, with the local agency's own contact details on every listing.

This article is general information for buyers, not legal or tax advice. Succession law, inheritance tax and registration procedure vary by country and often by region within a country, and they change. Before committing to a purchase from an estate, take advice from a qualified lawyer and notary in the jurisdiction where the property sits.