You inherited a house you did not plan on owning.

Probate in Cook County, and what has to happen before a deed can be signed

The Probate Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County sits at the Daley Center. If the estate has to be opened, someone is appointed as representative and receives letters of office, and that document is what gives them authority to sign a deed. No title company in Cook County will insure a sale out of an estate without seeing it.

Illinois has both independent and supervised administration. Independent administration is the common one and lets the representative sell without going back to the judge for approval. Supervised administration, which a court orders where heirs are in conflict or someone asks for it, means the sale needs court approval, and that is a date on somebody else's calendar. Which one you are in is the single biggest factor in how long an estate sale takes, and most families do not know which one they have until an attorney tells them.

Two things make this easier than people expect. First, we can go under contract before letters issue and make closing contingent on them, so the house is spoken for while the paperwork catches up. Second, we are patient. If the estate needs four months, the contract waits four months, and the number does not move because you took them.

We are not attorneys and none of this is legal advice. Every estate needs a probate attorney, and we are glad to give you names with nothing attached to them.

The small estate affidavit does not work for a house

This is the thing families get wrong most often, and it costs them weeks.

Illinois has a small estate affidavit that lets you settle an estate without opening probate at all, and in August 2025 the legislature raised the ceiling from $100,000 to $150,000. People read that, look at a modest house, and reasonably assume they are under the line and can skip court.

They cannot. If the decedent owned any real estate in Illinois, at any value, the small estate affidavit is unavailable and formal probate is required. A $90,000 house on the far south side triggers it exactly as a $900,000 house in Lincoln Park does. The affidavit is for bank accounts and personal property, and since the 2025 amendment vehicles sit outside the cap as well, but the house is the one asset it was never built to move.

Finding this out in week one is an inconvenience. Finding it out in week six, after a retail buyer has already been waiting a month and their rate lock is expiring, is how estate sales fall apart.

If a transfer on death instrument was recorded, the house may never enter probate

Before you assume probate, check whether there is a transfer on death instrument. Illinois has allowed these since 2012 and broadened them in 2021 to cover any real estate in the state, not just residential. It is a recorded document naming who gets the property, and when it is valid the house passes to that person at death without going through court at all.

It only works if it was done properly while the owner was alive: notarized, witnessed by two credible witnesses, and recorded with the county recorder before the death. One found in a desk drawer but never recorded is void, and that is the common disappointment. So the first call is to the recorder for the county the house sits in, not to a lawyer.

Two clocks matter afterwards, and they are the reason a careful title company asks questions. A surviving spouse can renounce the instrument within seven months of the death and take a statutory share instead. And the instrument can be contested for two years after the death, or six months if a probate estate has been opened. A buyer who does not know those windows exist finds out about them at the closing table.

The Illinois estate tax starts far lower than the federal one

Most families assume estate tax is a problem for the very rich, because the federal exemption is enormous. Illinois is a different story. The Illinois exclusion is $4 million, it is administered by the Illinois Attorney General rather than the Department of Revenue, and the return is due nine months after the date of death.

Four million sounds comfortable until you add a paid-off house, a retirement account, a life insurance policy and a second property. A Chicagoland family can cross that line without ever having thought of itself as wealthy, and the first sign is a deadline nine months back down the road.

This matters to a sale because unpaid estate tax is a lien, and title will want it dealt with before the deed records. It is also a reason not to let an estate drift: the clock started on the date of death, not on the day you got round to it. Your attorney and your accountant run this, not us, but we would rather you hear about it early from a buyer than late from a title company.

When the heirs do not agree

The most common version: one sibling lives out of state and wants the money, one lives nearby and has been quietly paying the taxes and the insurance for two years, and one wants to keep it and cannot afford to. A cash offer with a fixed number and a fixed date is often the only thing all three can agree on, because it removes the argument that actually divides them, which is what the house might be worth if somebody spent sixty thousand dollars fixing it up.

We will talk to all of you, together or separately, and we will put the same number in front of everyone. We do not negotiate one heir against another, and we will not be the reason a family stops speaking.

The house itself, and what an empty one quietly costs

Leave everything. Furniture, paperwork, a garage full of tools, a basement nobody has been down to in fifteen years. Take the photographs and the things that matter and we handle the rest. If there is something you want held aside rather than hauled, tell us and we will set it apart.

If the property has been sitting empty, three things are working against you and all three get worse with time. Most homeowner policies stop covering a house once it has been vacant for a set period, usually around thirty to sixty days, so the estate may be carrying an uninsured building without knowing it. A Chicago house that is vacant has to be registered with the city, with a fee in the hundreds and a renewal every six months, and most families learn this from a violation notice rather than from the ordinance. And an unheated winter in a house with original plumbing is how a sellable property becomes a gut rehab.

Meanwhile the taxes keep accruing, and in Cook County they are billed a year in arrears, so the estate is paying for a year in which the owner was often still alive. You can work your own numbers with the Illinois transfer tax calculator before you decide anything.