Someone Is Living in the House You Inherited and Will Not Leave

Why this stops so many estate sales

A house with someone living in it is a house you cannot show, cannot photograph honestly, and in most cases cannot sell on the open market. Families arrive at this problem sideways. Somebody moved in to care for a parent and simply stayed. A relative was "looking after the place". There was a tenant once, years ago, and nobody can find the lease or is sure one existed.

The instinct is usually to treat it as a family matter and keep asking. That is often the right first move, and we would not talk anyone out of it. But when asking stops working, it helps to know that Ohio does not treat this as a grey area. The chapter that governs it lists the situations it covers, and two of them were written for exactly the circumstances an estate finds itself in.

The grounds, and the two that matter here

When proceedings may be brought under ORC 1923.02(A)

Division (6) also carries a long provision about controlled-substance activity on residential premises, which is a landlord-and-tenant rule and not the subject of this article. We read it and have left it out rather than summarise it badly.

Division (5) is the one people are usually looking for without knowing its name. "Without colour of title" means the person has no legal claim to the property — no deed, no recorded interest, nothing that would make them an owner. A relative who moved in and stayed is very often exactly this. Notice that the ground says nothing about a lease, because it does not need to: what it turns on is their lack of claim and your right to possession.

Division (4) is the estate-specific one, and it has a condition attached that is easy to miss. It applies to sales by executors, administrators or guardians and to sales on partition — but "after the sales, so made on execution or otherwise, have been examined by the proper court and adjudged legal". That is a sequencing point worth raising with the estate's attorney early, because it affects when the route becomes available.

It starts with three days' notice, in a set form

Before beginning the action, you must notify the person to leave — three or more days beforehand. The statute sets out how that notice may be served, and there are four permitted methods:

• By certified mail, return receipt requested.
• By handing a written copy to the person in person.
• By leaving it at their usual place of abode.
• By leaving it at the premises from which they are sought to be evicted.

And where the notice is given by a landlord to recover residential premises, the statute prescribes wording that must appear "printed or written in a conspicuous manner":

That is not decorative. A notice that omits required language is the kind of defect that sends everybody back to the start, weeks later, with the house still occupied. This is a good reason to have the notice prepared properly rather than downloaded from somewhere.

The thing you must not do

Everyone in this situation is tempted by the short cut. Change the locks while they are out. Have the power shut off. Make the house unpleasant enough that the problem solves itself. Ohio addresses that directly, and the consequence is disproportionate to the temptation.

Read what is named: terminating utilities or services, exclusion from the premises, threat of any unlawful act. And note it covers not only a tenant but "a tenant whose right to possession has terminated" — someone whose tenancy is over is still protected. A separate division forbids seizing their possessions to recover rent except under a court order.

One honest caveat. That section is written in terms of a landlord and a tenant. Whether it reaches an occupant who was never a tenant at all — the occupier without colour of title in the ground above — is not a question the section answers, and we are not going to tell you it definitely does or does not apply to your situation. What we will say is that the safe course does not depend on the answer. Use the court route either way, and let an attorney worry about which label fits.

What happens at the end

Assuming the court grants restitution of the premises, the final step is mechanical. Within ten days after receiving the writ of execution, the sheriff, police officer, constable or bailiff is to execute it by restoring you to possession — and to levy and collect reasonable costs, which the statute caps at the standard motion fee.

If the other side appeals and obtains a stay with any required bond filed, the judge must immediately order all further proceedings on the execution delayed; and where possession has already been restored, the officer is to put the defendant back in possession. So a judgment is not quite the end of the road, though in most cases it is.

We have not set out what happens between filing and judgment — the complaint, service and any defences are their own sections, and we have not read them. That part is genuinely a job for an attorney, and it is the part where an error costs the most time.

If this started as a land contract

One useful connection. If the person in the house is there under a land installment contract and has stopped paying, serving the forfeiture notice that chapter requires constitutes compliance with the three-day notice requirement here. The two processes are designed to join up.

But that only helps where forfeiture is available to you at all — and once a land contract buyer has paid twenty per cent of the price or five years of instalments, it is not. At that point possession comes back only through foreclosure and a judicial sale, and none of this chapter is the route. We have written about that separately, and it is worth checking which side of that line your buyer is on before serving anything.

Where this leaves your options

An occupied house narrows some routes and closes none of them permanently:

• Keep it. Sometimes the honest answer, particularly where the occupant is family and the house is not costing the estate much. Understand that the position does not improve on its own.
• Repair, then list. Not available while somebody is living there. This route needs possession first, which is the whole problem.
• Rent it out properly. Where the occupant would sign a real lease and pay, this converts an informal mess into a normal tenancy. Worth exploring before anything adversarial.
• List it with an agent. Difficult while occupied — showings and photographs are the obstacle rather than the law. Expect 5.5%–6% commission plus closing costs and a market timeline once you can market it.
• Sell it yourself. Same practical obstacle, without the help.
• Sell direct to a cash buyer. We buy occupied houses, which is the main reason this route exists for this situation. Closing as fast as 7 days, typically around 21 days — though an occupied sale usually needs the position understood first.

We will not tell you a cash sale nets more, because selling a house with an unresolved occupancy usually means selling it for less. What it does is transfer a problem you may not want to spend a year on. Work out the net on each route — including the legal costs and the months of an eviction you would be funding — and compare those figures honestly. For some families the right answer is genuinely to sort it out first and sell properly afterwards.