How Do I Sell My Parent's House in Columbus? 360 Sold in 2026

Your mom or dad died, the house is now your problem, and nobody has told you what you are allowed to do with it. In Ohio you generally cannot sell it until the estate is opened in probate and the court appoints an executor or administrator. Once that person is appointed there are three legal routes to a sale, and which one you are on depends on what the will says. I pulled every 2026 closing in the seven Central Ohio counties and found 360 of these: estate and probate listings, median sale price $290,000, $188.83 a square foot, 11 days from listing to contract.

That last number is the one that surprised me. Eleven days. Every other resale that closed here this year took 18. And 63.3 percent of the estate sales closed at or over list price against 56.1 percent of the rest of the market. The dated, half emptied, sold-as-it-sits house your parent lived in for forty years is not what holds this up. The paperwork is.

I am Adam Geuy, a REALTOR and not an attorney, and I am going to say that more than once. What follows is what families go through, in the order it happens, with the Central Ohio numbers underneath it.

What is the first thing I have to do?

Before anyone signs a listing agreement, somebody has to be legally in charge of the estate. That means opening probate in the county where your parent lived and being appointed executor (if a will names you) or administrator (if there is no will). Central Ohio estates run through the county probate court, a division of the Court of Common Pleas: Franklin for most of Columbus, plus Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Union, Madison and Pickaway depending on the address. Of the 360 estate sales I pulled, 242 were in Franklin County, 37 in Licking, 31 in Delaware and 25 in Fairfield.

Two exceptions are worth checking before you open anything. If your parent recorded a transfer on death designation affidavit, title to the property vests in the named beneficiary at death and the house never enters the estate at all (ORC 5302.22). And if the whole estate is small enough, you may qualify for a summary release from administration: $35,000 or less in assets, or $100,000 or less where a surviving spouse takes everything (ORC 2113.03). A house usually blows past $35,000 by itself, which is why most estates holding a home go through full administration anyway. Pull the deed and look before you assume.

Once you are appointed, two clocks start. Ohio gives you three months from the date of appointment to file the estate inventory, which lists the house among the assets, unless the court extends it for good cause (ORC 2115.02). Separately, creditors have six months from the date of death to present claims against the estate (ORC 2117.06). That second clock is why most estates cannot fully close before roughly six months, even a clean one. You plan the sale around those windows instead of getting blindsided halfway through.

Can I sell the house before probate is finished?

Usually yes, and this is exactly where families get stuck, because there is no single rule. There are three routes and they are not interchangeable.

1. The will grants a power of sale. If your parent's will authorizes the executor to sell real property, the statute is blunt: "no order shall be required from the probate court for the executor, administrator, or testamentary trustee to proceed with the sale" (ORC 2113.39). This is the cleanest path and you can list close to a normal sale.

2. No power of sale, but everyone signs. If the will is silent, or there is no will, you can still sell without a court land sale action when the surviving spouse and all of the legatees and devisees, or all of the heirs in an intestate estate, give written consent. The price has to be at least 80 percent of the appraised value, and this route is unavailable if any of those people is a minor (ORC 2127.011). That 80 percent floor makes the inventory appraisal matter far more than most people expect.

3. Nobody agrees, or the estate needs supervision. Then you file a land sale proceeding, a court action for authority to sell the decedent's real property (ORC 2127.04). Slower, more formal, and it exists precisely for the messy ones.

Route 3 is rarer than families fear. Only 43 of the 360 estate and probate listings, 11.9 percent, carried a probate court approval contingency. So roughly nine out of ten of these sold on a power of sale or on written consent, without the court standing over the closing table. That matters to a buyer, because "subject to probate court approval" is the language that makes some buyers walk.

You often cannot tell which route you are on by reading the will yourself. The language is technical and the gap between a vague "may sell" and an express power of sale is worth months. That is a job for a probate attorney.

What does an estate house sell for in Columbus?

The whole cohort, set against the rest of the market. Everything below is 2026 closings, January 1 through September 14, in Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Union, Madison and Pickaway counties, new construction excluded.

Measure	Estate and probate listings	Every other resale
Closings, 2026 through Sept 14	360	15,650
Median sale price	$290,000	$350,000
Median price per square foot	$188.83	$212.78
Median square feet	1,458	1,616
Median year built	1971	1985
Days from listing to contract	11	18
Closed at or over list price	63.3%	56.1%
Closed at or over original list price	58.9%	47.8%
Paid in cash	30.3%	19.4%
Listing says as-is	50.6%	8.3%

Days are MLS entry date to under contract date. I do not use the MLS days-on-market field for anything, because it resets and it lies. If you want the longer version of why, I wrote about what days on market tells buyers and sellers.

Look at the two list-price rows together. Estate sellers not only beat list more often, they beat their original list price 58.9 percent of the time against 47.8 percent for everyone else. Translated: estate listings cut their price far less often. 41.1 percent of them finished under the original asking price, against 52.2 percent of the rest of the market. These are not desperate sales. They are usually priced at something a buyer will take, and then they get taken.

By town, with every place that closed at least 12 of them:

Town	Estate sales	Median price	Median $/sqft	Median sqft	Median year built	Days to contract	Cash
Hilliard	13	$355,000	$232	1,444	1987	7	23.1%
Westerville	20	$350,000	$222	1,595	1977	21	25.0%
Delaware	14	$303,250	$218	1,528	1992	10	21.4%
Grove City	12	$289,950	$198	1,499	1972	12	25.0%
Columbus	158	$253,000	$178	1,322	1963	10	33.5%
Newark	12	$197,450	$143	1,451	1930	6	41.7%

Westerville is the slow one on this table at 21 days, and it also has the largest houses on it. If you are selling a parent's place in town, the Westerville market page has the wider picture, and the Columbus housing market report covers the region.

Why do so many of these sell for cash?

Because half of them go to market as-is, and as-is plus a 1960s furnace is where financing gets difficult. 30.3 percent of the estate sales closed cash against 19.4 percent of everything else, and only 12.8 percent used FHA or VA financing against 15.9 percent of the rest of the market. Those two facts are the same fact: an appraiser on a government loan can require repairs an estate has no money or appetite to make, so those buyers self-select out and cash steps in.

The cash share climbs as the price falls. Newark 41.7 percent, Columbus 33.5 percent, Grove City and Westerville 25.0 percent, Hilliard 23.1 percent. That is the investor gradient, and you should know which kind of offer is sitting in front of you before you take it. I broke down whether cash buyers pay less in Columbus and what a cash offer costs you separately, because an estate is exactly the situation where somebody hands you a fast number and hopes you are tired.

Should we fix it up or sell it as-is?

This is the question every family asks me, and it finally has a number behind it.

Compare like with like. Among houses built before 1978, estate and probate listings closed at $174.80 a square foot. Everything else of the same vintage closed at $207.43. The two groups are within 47 square feet of the same size, 1,340 against 1,387, so this is not a big-house versus small-house illusion. The gap is $32.63 a foot, 15.7 percent, or about $43,700 on that median 1,340 square foot house.

That $43,700 is roughly what the market charges to take the house the way it sits. 56.2 percent of those pre-1978 estate listings said as-is, against 13.0 percent of comparable non-estate sales. And I am not going to pretend the whole gap is paint and carpet. Some of it is condition, some of it is that an estate with four siblings and a mortgage payment takes the first clean offer instead of the best one. You will not get $43,700 back by spending $43,700. You might get a meaningful share of it back by spending far less on the three or four things a buyer's lender will actually flag. Which three or four depends on the house. See as-is home sales in Ohio for what changes when that word goes in the listing, and what it costs to sell a house in Columbus for the rest of the math.

What will the estate owe in taxes when we sell?

Less than most people fear.

Ohio's estate tax reads on its face as a tax on "every person dying on or after July 1, 1968, and before January 1, 2013" (ORC 5731.02). If your parent died after that date, there is no Ohio estate tax and no Ohio inheritance tax on the house.

The federal side usually works in your favor. Property acquired from a decedent takes a basis equal to "the fair market value of the property at the date of the decedent's death" (26 U.S. Code 1014). So if your parent bought the place for $48,000 and the estate sells it at the cohort median of $290,000, the gain the IRS looks at is measured from the date-of-death value, not from 1971. That is why a defensible date-of-death valuation matters, and why I am not your CPA. Get one to run your specific numbers before you sign anything.

Isn't this just an estate sale?

No, and the two get mixed up constantly. An estate sale is the sale of the personal property inside the house: the furniture, the tools, the china and the collectibles. A probate sale is the sale of the real property, the house itself, handled through the probate process. Different events, different buyers, often different weeks. I break it down in Estate Sale vs Probate Sale.

133 of the 360 listings used the words "estate sale" in the listing copy and 106 said "probate." Agents mix the terms up too.

Do I need a probate attorney, or can I just call a Realtor?

You need both, and the order matters. The attorney tells you which of the three routes your estate is on and keeps you out of personal liability. That one conversation turns a fog into a checklist.

Now the part nobody mentions. Some probate attorneys will handle the legal side and then hand your listing to a Realtor friend of theirs, as a favor between the two of them, not a decision you got to make. So call me first. If you do not already have a probate attorney I will connect you with an excellent one, it costs you nothing, and you still pick your own agent. I would rather walk you to the right attorney than watch the listing get quietly traded away. If you want to know what to ask an agent in this exact situation, start with who is the best Realtor for probate and estate sales in Columbus.

How do I know what the house is worth?

My dad, my grandpa, my uncle and my great-grandpa were builders. I worked in it myself until I was twenty, and after that I sold roofs, siding, windows, gutters and downspouts. So when I walk an estate house I am looking for water first. Downspouts dumping against the foundation, stains in the basement, window seals that have failed, siding and soffit, whether an addition was done by someone who knew what they were doing or slapped together on a weekend. You still need a home inspection and I am not a home inspector. But I can tell you whether the house is structurally and systemically sound before your family decides what to spend on it.

That matters here more than anywhere else, because an inherited house has usually been lived in and loved for thirty or forty years and not touched since. A lot of agents walk in, see dated, and knock $40,000 off the number in their head on the spot. The median estate sale in this data set was built in 1971 and 57.8 percent of them predate 1978. Dated is the baseline in this cohort, not a defect. Knowing which tired thing is cosmetic and which one is structural is the difference between pricing it right and giving away the $43,700 on purpose.

What I will do for you

Send me the address of your parent's house. I will pull the parcel-level numbers and give you a valuation range for that exact property, plus a seller net sheet showing what the estate would walk away with after costs. That is the number your family is asking about. It is free, there is no obligation, and it does not matter whether you are six months into probate or still looking for the will. You can also start with the inherited a house walkthrough or get an instant home value range.

Call or text me at 937.239.2919, or grab a time at calendly.com/adam-geuy. We will do this at your pace.

Adam Geuy, Realtor - Blacktree Realty ABR, PSA, SRS | License #2020007964 937.239.2919 | calendly.com/adam-geuy

Sources

• MLS closings. All Central Ohio figures come from one script run against the flexmls residential exports in this package: 16,010 closed resales, 2026-01-01 to 2026-09-14, Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Union, Madison and Pickaway counties, new construction excluded. 360 of them carry unambiguous estate-administration language (probate, executor, estate sale, inherited, heirs, administrator, fiduciary, deceased, settling an estate) in the public description or the agent remarks. Bare "estate" was deliberately not counted, because it would sweep in licensed-agent boilerplate, every subdivision named for an estate, and luxury listing prose. Price per square foot is the median of per-sale ratios. Days are MLS entry date to under contract date, never the MLS days-on-market field.
• Ohio Revised Code 2113.39. A will's power of sale lets the fiduciary sell without a probate court order. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 2127.011. Sale without a land sale proceeding on written consent, at 80 percent of appraised value, unavailable if an heir is a minor. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 2127.04. The land sale proceeding. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 2115.02. Inventory due within three months of appointment. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 2117.06. Creditor claims within six months after death. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 2113.03. Summary release from administration at $35,000, or $100,000 with a surviving spouse taking all. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 5302.22. Transfer on death designation affidavit; title vests in the beneficiary at death. Verified September 24, 2026.
• Ohio Revised Code 5731.02. Ohio estate tax reaches deaths before January 1, 2013 only. Verified September 24, 2026.
• 26 U.S. Code 1014. Basis of property acquired from a decedent is fair market value at the date of death. Verified September 24, 2026.