The inheritance nobody asked for
It usually starts with a letter from a county you’ve never lived in. A parent or uncle owned five acres somewhere — bought on a trip, or inherited themselves — and now it’s yours. You’re grieving, the estate has forty other loose ends, and this one comes with an annual bill and no obvious way out. Land like this gets passed down not because anyone wants it, but because nobody knew what else to do with it.
The default is to do nothing. Years pass, taxes get paid out of habit, and eventually the same parcel lands on your own children. Donation is how that cycle ends: one round of signatures, and the property leaves the family with something to show for it — a deduction, and programs funded for veterans.
First, one legal reality
To donate the land, you have to own it. If the estate is still in probate, title hasn’t passed to you yet, and the deed can’t transfer until it does (or until the executor has authority to convey it). This isn’t a dealbreaker — it’s just sequencing. Many donors contact us mid-probate, we tell them what their state requires, and the donation closes shortly after the estate does.
Co-heirs: easier than you'd think
Inherited parcels often have two, three, or five owners of record. Every one of them must sign — and that turns out to be donation’s quiet advantage. Selling requires co-heirs to agree on a price, an agent, and who fields the calls. Donating requires them to agree on exactly one thing: we’re done paying for this. We prepare a single deed, send it to each signer with a notary arranged, and record it once everyone has signed. No family summit required.
The honest tax picture
Because inherited property gets a stepped-up basis — its value resets to the date-of-death value — recently inherited land carries little built-in capital gain. So unlike long-held farmland, the “avoid capital gains” argument barely applies here, and we won’t pretend otherwise. What you do get: a deduction for the land’s fair market value once you’ve held it (inherited property is automatically treated as long-term), the end of every future tax bill, and zero transaction costs — we pay deed, recording, and closing costs. Details and thresholds are on the tax benefits page.
What kind of inherited property qualifies?
Almost anything: vacant lots (the most common case), farm ground your family once worked (covered here), a house that’s beyond economical repair, timber tracts, even fractional interests in family land — those are reviewed case by case. Start with the two-minute form; note in it that the property is inherited and where the estate stands, and we’ll map the path from there.