What happens to a house in Alameda County probate, month by month

The first thing I tell people is that the house doesn't belong to them yet. It belongs to the estate, and the estate doesn't exist as a legal actor until a judge at the Rene C. Davidson courthouse says it does.

I filed these petitions for twenty years. Here is the order things happen in, with the form numbers, and with my opinion attached where I have one. It's general information from a retired paralegal, not legal advice. Your facts will differ from the ones in my examples.

Month one: the petition

Someone has to ask the court to open the estate. That is the Petition for Probate, form DE-111, filed with the probate clerk at 1225 Fallon Street in Oakland. The Alameda County probate division posts its local requirements. Read them before you walk in. The clerk will send you home over a missing declaration.

You also publish notice in a newspaper and mail form DE-121 to every heir and to everyone named in the will, whether or not they inherit. People skip a cousin and lose a month. Mail the cousin.

The petition asks the court to appoint a personal representative (an executor if the will names one, an administrator if not) and, if you check the box, to grant authority under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. That checkbox decides how the house gets sold.

If the house was the decedent's primary residence and the estate is small enough, there's a shorter petition that avoids full administration. The threshold changed in 2025, so check the self-help probate pages before assuming you need the long road.

Month two or three: the hearing and the letters

The hearing comes some weeks after filing. In Alameda County the probate examiner reviews the file beforehand and posts notes on anything defective. If the notes get cleared and nobody objects, the judge in Department 201 signs the order and the clerk issues Letters, form DE-150. Testamentary if there was a will, of administration if not.

Letters are the document everyone will ask for. Order more certified copies than you think you need.

I sat with a lot of families in that hallway for hearings that lasted forty seconds. The waiting is most of it.

Months three through seven: the creditor window

Once letters issue, the four-month creditor claim period starts. The representative mails a notice of administration to known creditors, and anyone with a claim against the decedent has four months from the letters, or sixty days from the notice, whichever is later, to file it. Until that window closes the estate can't safely distribute anything. Most attorneys won't close a sale of the house before it either, because the sale proceeds are what pays the claims.

In the same stretch the representative files the Inventory and Appraisal, DE-160. The house gets valued by the court-appointed probate referee, not by a realtor. Hold on to that referee number. It matters later if the sale needs court confirmation.

The house while all this is happening

The personal representative controls the house but doesn't own it. In practice:

The insurance has to be kept up, and the carrier has to be told the owner died. A vacant house on a standard homeowner's policy is the kind of claim carriers enjoy denying. Utilities stay on and get paid from an estate account, so the representative needs a tax ID for the estate; IRS Publication 559 walks through that and through the estate's own income tax filings. Property taxes keep coming due. The Alameda County tax portal doesn't care that the owner is dead.

If there are tenants, the representative is now the landlord. Rent goes into the estate account and nowhere else. Oakland's rent rules apply to the estate the same way they applied to the parent.

What the representative can't do: move a relative in rent-free, let a sibling haul off the furniture before the inventory, sell the house to themselves, or borrow against it without asking. Each of those has cost someone a surcharge at the final accounting.

Selling: full authority versus court confirmation

Here is the fork. If the court granted full authority under the IAEA, the representative can sell the house without a confirmation hearing. They sign a contract, then mail a Notice of Proposed Action, form DE-165, to every heir and beneficiary. Anyone with an objection has fifteen days to say so. No objection, and the sale closes on a normal escrow timeline.

If the court granted only limited authority, or an heir objects, the sale goes back to Department 201 for confirmation. The buyer's contract becomes an opening bid. At the hearing anyone in the room can overbid, and the first overbid has to top the accepted price by at least ten percent of the first ten thousand dollars plus five percent of the rest. The judge takes the highest bid. I once watched a buyer who had waited three months for a hearing lose the house to a stranger with a cashier's check.

A confirmed sale also has to come in at ninety percent of the referee's appraisal or better, which is why I told you to hold on to that number.

My opinion: ask for full authority on the DE-111 unless there's a real reason not to. Most objections to full authority come from heirs who haven't read the form.

Why it runs nine to eighteen months

Add it up. Weeks to the first hearing. Four months of creditor window that nobody can shorten. Fifteen days of notice on the sale. Then the final accounting and the petition for distribution, which gets its own hearing. Nine months is a clean estate with a cooperative family and a lawyer who files on time. Eighteen is normal. Longer than that usually means somebody contested the will, or the representative got tired.

When a cash sale makes sense

A conventional buyer with a loan doesn't tolerate any of this. Their rate lock expires. Their lender wants clean title and an occupancy date, and the estate can't promise either until letters issue and the notice period runs.

The sales that survived were often to a Bay Area cash buyer that takes probate houses, because that buyer has no lender to satisfy and can set the close for whatever date the estate can actually deliver. The house goes as-is, which matters since the representative has no authority to spend estate money on a new roof anyway.

Not every probate house should go that way. A Rockridge house with no deferred maintenance and patient heirs will do better on the open market, and the representative has a duty to get a fair price.

But when the creditor window is still open and the heirs want it over with, what I suggest is getting a written cash offer on the house early, putting it in the file next to the referee's appraisal, and letting the representative decide with both numbers in front of them. The courts' self-help site has the distribution steps that come after. Compared to what came before, they're short.