Curative title deals are real estate deals where something is wrong with the title, and that something has to be fixed before the property can be sold the normal way.
Title is just the legal record of who owns a property and who has a claim against it. When that record is broken, nobody can sell, nobody can borrow against it, and nobody wants to touch it.
The list of what can go wrong is long. Multiple deceased owners. Breaks in the chain of title. Lienholders who went out of business years ago. Liens where nobody can get a payoff amount. Federal tax liens. Medicaid or Medicare related claims. Probate that was never opened. Heirs who never put the house in their own names.
These are the properties most investors call junk.
That is exactly how Junk Home Buyers got started. The focus was on properties nobody wanted: abandoned houses, houses with serious structural problems, and houses with title so tangled that everybody else hung up the phone.
Get good at finding these properties and working through the problems, and you end up in a part of the business with a lot less competition.
The hard part usually isn’t finding the deals. The hard part is solving the problems.
Every Haitian Family Already Knows This Story
If you grew up in a Haitian household, none of this is new. It just has a different name.
Back home there is the lakou, the family yard. Grandpa bought the land. He had seven children. Those children had children. Nobody went to the notary, nobody had the land surveyed again, and nobody split anything on paper. Everybody just knows that piece is “tè fanmi,” family land.
Then one cousin wants to sell. Another is in Montreal. An aunt is in Brooklyn and has not answered the phone since the funeral. One uncle swears Grandpa promised him the whole thing. And the paper everybody is arguing over still has a dead man’s name on it.
That is a curative title deal. Same problem, different country.
It follows families here too. The first generation works double shifts, buys the house, pays it off, and never writes a will because talking about death feels like inviting it in. Then they pass, and the children inherit a house and a puzzle at the same time.
The elders say “dèyè mòn gen mòn.” Behind the mountain there are more mountains. Messy title works the same way. Solve one problem and the next one is standing right behind it. The people who make it in this niche are the ones who keep climbing.
Where to Find Curative Title Deals
Two of the best places to start are tax delinquent properties and properties heading toward tax foreclosure.
The old saying is that the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. Curative title deals tend to bring both to the same address.
When a property has been behind on taxes for years, there is usually a reason. Sometimes the owner died. Sometimes the family inherited it and never finished probate. Sometimes there are heirs scattered across different states and nobody is sure who owns what. Sometimes the family knows about the title problem and simply stopped putting money into the house.
Some properties have been delinquent for 10, 20, even 30 years. The longer the taxes have gone unpaid, the more there is to dig into.
Tax delinquent lists
This list comes from the office that collects property taxes. Don’t confuse it with the appraisal or assessment office. The assessor decides what a property is worth for tax purposes. The tax collector collects the money.
Depending on the county, the list may be free or there may be a fee. It may show up as a CSV, TXT, DAT, spreadsheet, or some raw file that has to be converted before anybody can use it.
Sometimes getting the data is a real headache. That is not a bad thing. If the list takes extra work to get and clean, most investors won’t bother, and fewer people end up mailing and calling the same families.
Tax foreclosure lists
These properties are much further along. The owner or the heirs have already received notices and a deadline is coming. That creates urgency. The downside is less time to research and solve the problem.
Code enforcement
Think of a code enforcement list as driving for dollars with data. Instead of riding around looking for tall grass, boarded windows and sagging roofs, the code officers have already written those houses up.
One thing to know: code enforcement records are often kept by the city, not the county. If a county has several cities in it, each one may need its own request.
Cleaning and Filtering the List
Getting the list is only the beginning. Government data almost never arrives ready to use.
The goal is one standard spreadsheet that can be researched, filtered, skip traced (looking up current phone numbers and addresses for the people tied to a property), and later loaded into whatever system is used to track conversations.
At a minimum, keep these fields:
- Parcel ID or APN (the county’s ID number for the property)
- Property address, city, state and ZIP
- Owner mailing address, city, state and ZIP
- Years of delinquent taxes
- Total amount owed
- Legal description
- Property type
If the county gives more than that, keep it. It is far easier to save everything on day one than to go back and rebuild the list later.
Once the data is clean, not every owner on it needs a call. The point is to find the records most likely to have a complicated ownership story.
The simplest filter is how many years the property has been delinquent. A house that is several years behind deserves a closer look than one that just missed the last bill.
Other clues: a deceased owner, a PO box or an odd mailing address, an owner tied to several properties, an owner who lives somewhere else, or a name on the record that does not match whoever is living there or cutting the grass.
Each one is a sign that something happened in the ownership history.
Research First, Then Call Like a Neighbor
Curative title work takes more homework than a regular deal. Before picking up the phone, get a basic picture of the situation.
- Is the owner alive? If not, when did they pass?
- Is there an obituary? Who are the surviving relatives?
- Was probate ever opened?
- Does the mailing address match the property?
- Who is paying the taxes, keeping up the yard, or getting the mail?
- How many people may have inherited a piece?
The whole title problem does not need to be solved before the first call. The research is there so nobody is calling blind and asking a grieving family if they want to sell a house.
The call itself is different too. The usual real estate guy opens with, “Hi, I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in selling the property at 123 Main Street.”
These conversations go better when they start with the problem instead of the sale:
“Hi, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with this property. It looks like there may be some title issues and some taxes behind. Do you know anything about it, or who I should talk to?”
Anybody raised around Haitian elders already knows this rhythm. Nobody walks into the house and gets straight to business. First comes the greeting, then “how is the family,” then the real conversation. Respect comes first, and people open up to respect.
That is when the details come out that no database has. The house belonged to a brother. The parents died and nobody did probate. The family stopped paying taxes because they could not get clear title. There are six cousins and nobody knows what to do.
Those details are what make it possible to piece the ownership back together.
Who Actually Owns It: Heirs, Affidavits and Probate
Intestate succession
Intestate succession is the set of state rules that decides who inherits when someone dies without a valid will. The rules change from state to state. Ownership might pass to a spouse, children, parents, siblings, or more distant relatives.
This is where the lakou problem shows up on paper. Someone dies owning a house. Their share passes to several children. One of those children dies, and that share passes to a spouse or to their own kids. Another heir dies and it splits again.
Years later one small house can have a dozen owners, while the public record still shows a person who died decades ago. That is why building the family tree becomes part of the job.
Affidavits of heirship
An affidavit of heirship is a sworn statement of facts about a deceased person’s family and heirs. Attorneys and title companies review it and decide whether they are comfortable relying on it. Whether it can be used at all depends on the state and the situation.
One deceased owner can be fairly simple. Several generations who died without transferring anything can take multiple affidavits, probate cases, deeds, releases and more.
Probate
If the owner on record died and the property was never legally transferred, probate may be required before it can be sold with clear title. Probate is the court process that settles a deceased person’s estate.
Costs vary widely based on the state, the attorney, the number of heirs and whether anybody is fighting. Some attorneys take part of the fee upfront and the rest when the property closes.
Plan for the costs
These deals are not expensive to find. Solving them is where the money goes: title searches, attorney fees, probate filings, affidavits, deeds, recording fees, lien research and document preparation.
Work with a title company or real estate attorney who handles these files regularly, especially with deceased owners, shared ownership, liens or family disputes. Price it in before getting deep into the deal.
Buying a Seat at the Table
One approach used in some curative title situations is buying one owner’s interest in the property instead of putting the whole property under a regular purchase contract.
The idea is simple. It buys a seat at the table. An investor who owns an interest is no longer an outsider waiting on the family to fix everything. They are a co-owner with a direct stake in getting the title cleared.
It also carries real legal and financial risk. The right deed, paperwork, title research and disclosures depend on state law and the specific family situation. This should be set up with a qualified real estate attorney or title professional, not improvised.
Why Families Walk Away
The surprising part is that the house often isn’t the problem. Sometimes it is perfectly livable. The problem is ownership.
A family pays off the house, then finds out a relative is still on title. Someone inherits a home and learns that five cousins inherited it too. A widow discovers her husband bought the place with his brother thirty years ago.
They call agents. They call attorneys. They try to sell. Everybody tells them the same thing: come back when the title is clear.
In a lot of immigrant families there is also pride and silence around it. Nobody wants to be the one who “sold Manman’s house,” so nobody does anything. Eventually the taxes stop getting paid and the grass stops getting cut.
Then the property lands on a tax delinquent, tax foreclosure or code enforcement list.
That is what curative title investors are really looking for. Not just a distressed house. A distressed ownership situation, and a family that needs somebody patient enough to help them out of it.
A Simple Curative Title Workflow
- Pull tax delinquent, tax foreclosure, code enforcement and other public records.
- Convert the raw data into one standard spreadsheet.
- Filter for deeper distress: years of unpaid taxes, deceased owners, odd mailing addresses, ownership that doesn’t add up.
- Research the ownership history and the possible heirs.
- Skip trace the people connected to the property.
- Reach out to the owner, heirs or relatives and find out what happened.
- Work out who actually owns an interest.
- Identify the title problems blocking a normal sale.
- Bring in title and legal professionals to decide which documents or court steps are needed.
- Resolve the ownership and title issues.
- Once the title is marketable, choose the exit.
The Bigger Opportunity
The edge here isn’t finding distressed properties. It is being able to solve problems other buyers don’t know how to solve.
Most investors want it clean. One owner, clear title, easy access, simple closing.
Curative title deals are the opposite. Somebody died. Nobody did probate. There are heirs in four states. Taxes are years behind. The city has violations on the house. The records are out of date and nobody is sure who owns what.
That is exactly why most people walk away, and exactly why the door stays open.
There is a proverb for this work: “ti pa ti pa, n a rive.” Step by step, we will get there. One heir, one signature, one document at a time. And “yon sèl dwèt pa manje kalalou.” One finger alone cannot eat okra. No one clears a messy title alone. It takes the family, the attorney and the title company pulling the same direction.
Is Your Family Stuck in One of These?
If there is a house in the family with a name on the deed of someone who has passed, unpaid taxes piling up, or relatives who can’t agree on what to do, it is not hopeless and it is not too messy. Reach out through the form on this site and share what is going on. Somebody will call back, listen to the whole story, and help figure out the next step.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Title and inheritance rules vary by state, so talk with a licensed attorney about a specific property.