What to Do First About the House After a Parent Dies

When a parent dies, the house can feel like the biggest question in the room. Whether to keep it, sell it or rent it can wait. In the first weeks, the job is smaller and more manageable: keep the home protected, find a few key documents, and bring in the right people. It is the same order we follow with families across Los Feliz.

At Rooster Homes, this often starts with a quiet phone call where nothing is signed and nothing is decided. What follows is the list we walk through together.

• Lock up. Make sure every door and window is secured and you know who has keys. If many people have keys, the family may agree to change the locks.
• Keep the utilities on. Power, water and gas help protect the home from damage and will be needed for showings and inspections later.
• Call the insurance company. Tell them the owner has passed and whether the house is empty. Some policies limit coverage when a home sits vacant, and the insurer can tell you what keeps it covered.
• Collect the mail. Bills, tax notices and HOA letters often arrive at the house, and the attorney will want to see them.
• Leave valuables and papers where they are, or in a secure place the family agrees on, until the attorney says how belongings should be handled.

The single most useful document at the start is the most recent recorded deed. It shows how the home was held: in a living trust, jointly with someone who survived, as community property with a spouse, with a transfer-on-death deed, or in your parent's name alone. How title was held largely decides whether the house needs probate. We can usually pull the deed through a title company, and our walkthrough explains what each form of title means.

Look also for a will, a living trust, and recent statements for any mortgage or home equity loan. Order several certified copies of the death certificate. When a trust sells a home, title and escrow commonly ask for one, and banks and other institutions will ask too.

Whoever is named in a will or trust, no one should sign a listing or accept an offer yet. If the house is in a living trust, the successor trustee (the person the trust names to take over) can usually sell without going to court, and must send a notice to the trust's beneficiaries and the heirs, generally within 60 days after the trust becomes irrevocable. If the house has to go through probate, no one has authority to sell until the court appoints a personal representative and issues a document called Letters. A will alone does not give that authority.

An estate attorney tells you which path applies and what comes next. If a mortgage payment is behind or a notice arrives about the loan, tell the attorney right away, since there are steps they can take quickly when timing matters.

• If anyone hopes to live in the house. California changed the property tax rules for inherited homes in 2021. A child keeps a parent's property tax base only in limited cases, such as when it was the parent's home and the child makes it their own principal residence within one year, and only up to a cap. Raise this early with the attorney and a CPA.
• If a spouse or registered domestic partner survived. They can often use a shorter court process than full probate to confirm the home passes to them.
• If someone is living in the house, whether a relative or a tenant, since that affects timing and access.

Once the path is clear, the decisions about the house come one at a time: whether to prepare it, how to price it, when to list. We help with each one, alongside the attorney, and once there is authority to sell, the work starts the same day. Until then, our role is to help keep the home protected and answer questions as they come up. If family members are asking you what will happen to the house, it is enough to tell them it is being looked after and that decisions will come later.

If you would like a calm first conversation about your parent's home, with nothing to sign, request a confidential consultation. We will listen first.