In another example of how Nevada needs to catch up to the rest of the country, there’s a little-known law that lets nearly anyone sell the home of a deceased person who doesn’t leave behind a will.
And many times, as has been the case in Nevada, the people who take control of the property and sell it for profit never have contact with the surviving family members. And to prove they hae
The story came out in January 2024. But Nevada’s legislature only meets once every two years. So, a bill to change the state’s probate laws is just being heard in a committee hearing in Carson City.
All of this came to light from an investigation more than a year ago in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Reporter Eli Segall said the story grew out of a tip – proven to be false--after the murder of R-J reporter Jeff German. German had been writing stories about then-Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles, who was convicted of the murder last year.
Looking deeper into how probate cases are handled, Segall said, he and another reporter made some surprising findings.
“The two private administrators who we focused on the most (had) around 500 cases combined,” Segall said. “They routinely sold the homes to a very small circle of house flippers. These were repeat buyers who would almost always sell the homes for a higher price. Now, granted, what we found was that they very often fixed up these homes and put money into it.”
Nothing that was being done was illegal. But the state threshold for who can take over the property of someone who died without a will, Segall said, was very loose. The state has a priority list, with family members at the top. The last group of people who can overtake an estate “is anyone, quote, legally qualified.”
In Nevada, Segall added, “that means you are over 18 and not a convicted felon. That’s it.”
State Sen. Melanie Scheible, D-Las Vegas, is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on a bill to strengthen the threshold for “uninterested parties” to take over a property that lands in probate court.
“Those administrators will have to go through the court and ask permission before they sell the property or dispose of the property,” she said. “If somebody who is not in the prescribed list that's already spelled out in the (Nevada Revised Statutes) is going to be appointed as the administrator, there has to be … good cause for it.”
“They also have to submit a very basic statement of qualifications.”
She added that this could prevent “the situation where you have uninterested parties who maybe live out of state coming in and requesting to administer estates without any kind of reason and maybe without any kind of experience or qualifications to handle a real estate transaction.”
She added this does not stop developers and house-flippers from becoming administrators of estates. But “it will be harder for an investment company to take over administration of a vacant house and short sale it and flip it and sell it again. … And they may be required to distribute those gains to the heirs of the season.”
Guests: Melanie Scheible, state senator, Nevada; Eli Segall, business reporter, Las Vegas Review-Journal.
