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Some buildings are looked after by someone who did not buy them to live in. An executor administering an estate, a guardian holding a ward's house, a bankruptcy trustee, a court-appointed receiver, a tax-sale purchaser inside a redemption period, an assignee winding up a failed business — each is answerable for a property on terms a statute sets rather than terms they chose. These guides read those statutes state by state, with the primary text quoted, and answer the two questions that decide what actually happens on site: who has the duty, and who pays for the work.
Texas law does not leave the upkeep of an estate's house to the executor's discretion. Section 351.101 imposes a prudent-person duty and a specific obligation to keep estate buildings in good repair. What that covers, how neglect reaches the bond sureties under Section 351.003, and what the estate reimburses under Section 352.051.
Read articleOklahoma states the repair duty in an unusual standard and then limits it twice. Section 290 requires an executor to keep houses, buildings and fixtures in good tenantable repair, but only those under the executor's control, and the homestead realty is carved out of possession entirely.
Read articleAlabama runs the opposite way from its neighbours. Texas and Louisiana impose a duty to repair estate buildings; Alabama Code Section 43-2-844 puts ordinary and extraordinary repairs behind prior court approval, while leaving insurance, borrowing and protection costs authorised without one.
Read articleArkansas is the outlier among the states Ethreon covers. Real property does not automatically come into the personal representative's hands at all, and the powers to repair, maintain and insure it are permissive rather than mandatory, conditioned on the property becoming an estate asset or on a court finding preservation necessary.
Read articleLouisiana states the duty in one sentence and attaches personal liability to it. Article 3221 requires a succession representative to preserve, repair, maintain and protect succession property; Article 3191 makes the representative personally responsible for all damages resulting from a failure to act as a prudent administrator.
Read articleTexas adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act in 2017. It inserts a valuation, a family buyout right and a preference for partition in kind before any sale, and it makes the record of who actually paid the taxes, insurance and upkeep a statutory factor the court must weigh.
Read articleAlabama adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in 2014. Its version runs a shorter buyout clock than Texas, builds in machinery for unknown and non-appearing cotenants, and expressly counts physical maintenance and upkeep among the factors a court weighs before ordering a sale.
Read articleArkansas adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act in 2015. Its buyout mechanics follow Texas, its partition-in-kind factors follow Alabama, and it states its own commencement rule: the subchapter applies to partition actions filed on or after January 1, 2016.
Read articleTexas guardianship law does not tell a guardian to keep the ward's buildings in repair. It does something sharper: it requires an annual sworn account describing the condition and use of the property, and makes the guardian account for the income prudent management would have produced.
Read articleLouisiana runs curatorship of an interdict through the tutorship rules. The curator must take possession of, preserve and administer the property and is personally responsible for all damages — yet the annual account is a financial statement that says nothing about the condition of a building.
Read articleAlabama gives a conservator the express power to make ordinary or extraordinary repairs to buildings — the same words that, in a decedent's estate, require prior court approval. The default flips depending on whether the owner is living, and the limits appear on the letters of appointment.
Read articleOklahoma states the strongest property duty of any state in this series. A guardian of the property must keep it safely, permit no unnecessary waste, maintain the buildings out of estate income, and deliver the property at the end in as good condition as it was received.
Read articleOhio writes no maintenance clause into its guardianship chapter. What it writes instead is a limit: a guardian's control is confined to the authority the Revised Code, the courts and the probate court have granted, and spending the ward's money to improve the ward's building runs through a petition, three court-appointed freeholders and a judicially fixed budget.
Read articlePennsylvania borrows the adult guardian's property duty wholesale from the subchapter on minors' estates. The borrowed section is the most explicit spending authority in this series - and Pennsylvania is the only state in it that tells a guardian what to do when the building is no longer worth keeping.
Read articleArkansas writes no repair clause into its guardianship chapter. It writes two things instead: a compulsory taking of possession of the ward's real property, and an instruction that the law of trusts applies to the guardian's duties. On a decedent's estate the same state says almost the opposite.
Read articleThe Handbook for Chapter 7 Trustees tells panel trustees to obtain control over property that has value for the estate, naming lock changes and guards, and says waiting for the meeting of creditors is not always sufficient. What the duty covers in the four Texas districts, how Section 506(c) funds it, and when a field vendor is a professional person requiring court approval.
Read articleEvery article about a chapter 7 trustee's duty to secure estate property quotes the Handbook for Chapter 7 Trustees. In Alabama that document states the views of a Justice Department program that does not operate there. Alabama and North Carolina are the only two states outside the United States Trustee Program: their six judicial districts never made the election Congress offered in 1986, so the bankruptcy courts still appoint and supervise the panel through a bankruptcy administrator under Judicial Conference regulations. The trustee's preservation duty is identical, because it sits in 11 U.S.C. § 704. What changes is who appoints the trustee, who supervises the case, who pays for the system, and where a vendor takes a problem.
Read articleBefore a chapter 7 trustee has any reason to secure an Ohio house, the house has to be worth securing - and that turns on the homestead exemption, not on the trustee's diligence. Read R.C. 2329.66(A)(1)(b) and you get $125,000. That is not the operative figure. Division (B) of the same section makes the Ohio Judicial Conference adjust every dollar amount in it every three years for inflation and publish the result in the Register of Ohio, and the memorandum in force puts the residence exemption at $182,625 from 1 April 2025 through 31 March 2028. A $57,625 gap decides whether a house is an asset of the estate or an abandonment waiting to happen.
Read articlePennsylvania is the outlier in this series twice over. Its exemption subchapter, 42 Pa.C.S. §§ 8121 to 8128, contains no homestead exemption of any kind - the nearest thing is a general monetary exemption of $300, a figure that has not moved in decades and that expressly includes real property. And Pennsylvania never opted out of the federal exemptions, so a Pennsylvania debtor may elect 11 U.S.C. § 522(d) instead and claim $31,575. For married debtors a third route matters more than either: property held as tenants by the entireties is reachable through § 522(b)(3)(B) to the extent it is exempt from process under state law. Which route the debtor takes decides whether a trustee has any reason to secure the house.
Read articleOklahoma's homestead exemption has no dollar figure in it. Title 31 § 1 exempts "the home of such person, provided that such home is the principal residence," and § 2 limits it by area alone - 160 acres outside a city or town, one acre inside. Oklahoma also opted out of the federal exemptions, so there is no smaller alternative for a debtor to be pushed onto. For a chapter 7 trustee that means an Oklahoma house usually produces nothing for the estate, and the few cases where it does turn on borrowed federal limits: the $214,000 cap in 11 U.S.C. § 522(p) on interest acquired within 1,215 days of filing, the ten-year lookback in § 522(o), and one odd state rule that collapses the exemption to $5,000 when more than a quarter of the building is used for business.
Read articleLouisiana's homestead exemption is one of the smallest in the footprint in money and one of the largest in land: $35,000 of value, on up to five acres inside a municipality or two hundred acres outside it. Louisiana also opted out of the federal exemptions, so that figure is the figure. Two provisions make Louisiana unlike anywhere else in this series. The exemption becomes unlimited for debts arising from a catastrophic or terminal illness, on the home's value one year before seizure. And property insurance proceeds from a gubernatorially declared disaster, held separately in escrow for repair or replacement, are exempt in their own right - the homestead statute and the general exemption statute both say so.
Read articleArkansas has the strangest homestead exemption in the footprint and the only affirmative election statute. The value cap is $2,500, a figure set in the 1874 Constitution and never raised. But both the Constitution and the Homestead Exemption Act of 1981 go on to say the homestead shall in no event be reduced below a quarter of an acre in town, or eighty acres outside it, "without regard to value" - so on an ordinary urban lot the cap never bites and the exemption is effectively unlimited. Arkansas also never opted out: A.C.A. § 16-66-217 gives residents the right to elect either the Arkansas package or 11 U.S.C. § 522(d). And one condition excludes a whole class of debtor - only a person "married or the head of a family" has a homestead at all.
Read articleLegal explainers cover how a receivership is created. Almost none cover the field work: what to secure in week one, what to document, and what happens to the property while the case runs.
Read articleOhio's nuisance abatement statute gives a court-appointed receiver possession, contracting authority and a cost-recovery route that outranks taxes and mortgages. The powers are permissive, the lien is conditional, and there is a sixty-day recording deadline that decides whether the priority exists at all.
Read articleSection 214.003 and Section 214.0031 of the Local Government Code both put a court-appointed receiver in control of a substandard Texas building. They differ on who can bring the action, how long the owner has to pay, whether the structure can be demolished, and whether the buyer at the end takes free and clear.
Read articleR.S. 40:600.31 and following builds a receivership unlike Ohio's or Texas's. The petition cannot be filed without an affidavit from the owner consenting; the rehabilitation target is a federal HUD standard rather than a local code; and a project that is not cost-effective at fifty percent of replacement cost does not qualify.
Read articlePennsylvania's Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act lets a neighbor, lienholder, municipality or land bank petition a court to take possession of a vacant building and rehabilitate it at the owner's cost. The four conditions that must all be met, the nine blight findings, and what an owner can still do.
Read articleOhio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Louisiana all let a court hand a derelict building to someone else to fix. Alabama does not. Its answer is Chapter 53B of Title 11: the municipality finds the nuisance, orders repair or demolition, contracts the work itself, and assesses the cost as a lien that expressly ranks behind taxes and prior-recorded mortgages.
Read articleOhio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Louisiana all have a way for someone other than the owner to end up holding a derelict building. Oklahoma does not. Its only receivership is 12 O.S. Section 1551, carried forward from the Revised Laws of 1910, and every ground in it runs through a creditor, a mortgagee, a co-owner or a judgment - never a municipality or a neighbour. The powers section that follows never uses the words repair, maintain or preserve. What Oklahoma built instead sits in Title 11 Chapter 22: a city may tear a dilapidated building down, board and secure it, clean and mow around it, and meter its own costs quarterly against an abandoned-building list - but nowhere in that chapter may it repair anything.
Read articleArkansas is the second state in this series with no blighted-property receivership, and its receivership chapter is in worse repair than Oklahoma's - three sections marked [Superseded.], a subchapter reduced to an editorial note, and a bridge provision that points at one of the empty sections. What Arkansas built instead is not a receivership at all. It is a priority contest, and it is decided on what the mortgage holder did rather than on what the building looks like: a city that gives seven business days' notice before it works, and wins a declaration in circuit court afterwards, can place its clean-up lien ahead of a previously recorded mortgage - but only up to $1,000 for mowing, $5,000 for a board-up, $7,500 for a demolition and $15,000 for environmental remediation.
Read articleBuy at a Texas tax sale and the former owner can still redeem - two years on a homestead or agricultural land, 180 days on anything else. Section 34.21 lets you add to the redemption price what you reasonably spent "for maintaining, preserving, and safekeeping the property," and enumerates five categories inside that phrase. Then subsection (i) attaches a condition most purchasers discover too late: on written request you have ten days to deliver an itemisation, and "only those amounts included in the itemization provided to the owner may be allowed as costs for purposes of redemption." Work you cannot itemise is work you funded for someone else.
Read articleAlabama is the only state in the footprint that defines property preservation in its own statute. Section 40-10-122(d) says "preservation improvements" means improvements made to preserve the property "by properly keeping it in repair for its proper and reasonable use, having due regard for the kind and character of the property at the time of sale" - and subsection (c) makes their value, plus casualty insurance premiums, recoverable from a redeeming owner at eight per cent per annum. The catch is procedural and severe. Valuation runs through a chain of ten-day steps ending in a referee and an umpire, and a purchaser who fails to appoint a referee "shall forfeit his or her claim to compensation for such improvements."
Read articleTexas and Alabama both pay a tax-sale purchaser back for maintaining the property. Ohio pays nothing, and the reason is structural rather than stingy. R.C. 5721.35 vests a tax certificate holder with the first lien the state and its taxing districts held - not title, not possession. R.C. 5721.38 then lists exactly what a redeeming owner pays: the certificate redemption prices, eighteen per cent a year, the prosecuting attorney's fee with the same eighteen per cent, reasonable attorney's fees where a private attorney was retained, and other costs of the proceeding. Securing, mowing, boarding and insuring the building appear nowhere, because the certificate holder has no business doing any of it.
Read articleOklahoma asks a different question from Texas and Alabama. Those states let a purchaser add preservation costs to a redemption price because a redemption period exists. Oklahoma's redemption right ends "before the start of the resale auction" under 68 O.S. § 3113, and the resale deed under § 3131 vests in the grantee "an absolute and perfect title in fee simple." There is no redemption window after the sale, so there is no cost-recovery provision and no counterparty to recover from. What replaces it is a different risk: a twelve-month window in which the deed can still be attacked, and a disability exception that outlives it.
Read articleLouisiana replaced its tax sale system with tax lien certificates on 1 January 2026, under Acts 2024, No. 774 and Acts 2025, No. 411. The vocabulary changed with it: there is no redemption now, there is extinguishment of a lien, and the amount paid is the "termination price" under R.S. 47:2243. That price is face value, penalty, the cost of the termination certificate, interest, post-auction notice costs capped at five hundred dollars, and subsequent statutory impositions. Nothing for maintaining, securing or insuring the building - because the certificate holder never takes possession of it. Two of the recoverable items are forfeited outright if a notice step is missed.
Read articlePennsylvania runs two tax sale systems and they answer this question in opposite ways. Under the Real Estate Tax Sale Law of 1947, used by county tax claim bureaus across most of the state, section 607 says there shall be no period of redemption after the sale and the sale passes good and valid title. Under the Municipal Claims and Tax Liens Act of 1923, used in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, there is a redemption right - nine months, or three months in a city or county of the second class since a 2023 amendment - and the redemption price expressly includes "the insurance upon the property, and other charges and necessary expenses of the property, actually paid, less rents or other income therefrom," with ten per cent interest. But section 32(c) removes redemption entirely for vacant property, and defines vacancy by a ninety-day occupancy test measured at two separate dates.
Read articleSearch Arkansas's tax code for a provision reimbursing a purchaser's preservation costs and you will not find one, because the answer lives in Title 18 rather than Title 26. The Commissioner of State Lands conveys tax-delinquent land by limited warranty deed, and an action to contest that conveyance is barred after ninety days - there is no redemption period to price. What protects a purchaser who later loses a title fight is A.C.A. § 18-60-213, an 1883 betterment statute: a person who under colour of title has peaceably improved land afterwards adjudged to belong to another is paid the value of the improvements and all taxes paid, and no writ of possession issues until that balance is met.
Read articleAn assignment for the benefit of creditors is the state-law alternative to a Chapter 7 liquidation, and in Texas it runs on a 1967 statute that has never been amended. Chapter 23 of the Business and Commerce Code imposes three things that catch out-of-state restructuring firms: the assignee must be a resident of Texas and of the county where the debtor lives or ran its principal business, must record the assignment in every county where the estate holds real property, and must file a bond within five days before taking possession of anything. The assignee's expenses are paid from the estate - but the amount is fixed by the court that approved the bond.
Read articleAlabama replaced a one-sentence recording statute from 1896 with a full modern framework. The Uniform Assignment for Benefit of Creditors Act, enacted as SB15 of the 2026 Regular Session, applies to assignments made on or after 1 October 2026. Under it the assignee obtains the rights, title and interests of the assignor, must record the assignment against real property in whichever jurisdiction it sits, and has an express power to operate a business "including preservation of the asset." Who pays for that preservation is the sharp part: expenses of preserving or disposing of encumbered collateral come off the secured creditor's recovery only where they benefit that creditor and were incurred "with the protected secured creditor's consent or acquiescence."
Read articleOhio runs assignments for the benefit of creditors through the probate court, and two provisions shape everything a contractor does on an assigned site. R.C. 1313.02 makes the assignment effective only from the time it is delivered to the probate judge, who indorses the exact time on it. And R.C. 1313.51 refuses any allowance for necessary or extraordinary expenses unless a bill of items is filed, supported by the affidavit of the person who incurred the expense or performed the service - and, where someone other than the assignee did the work, a second affidavit from the assignee confirming the full amount has already been paid to them.
Read articleOklahoma's assignment statute dates from the Revised Laws of 1910 and it is the least forgiving in this series. Section 42 of Title 24 makes an assignment void against the assignor's creditors and against good-faith purchasers and encumbrancers if it is not recorded and the inventory filed within twenty days. Section 45 then withholds all authority from the assignee until four separate steps are complete - inventory and affidavit made, assignment recorded, inventory filed, and bond given. And section 48 lets the assignment itself restrict the assignee's commissions to a lesser amount, or deny them altogether.
Read articleEvery state in this segment eventually gets to the question of who looks after the buildings. Arkansas puts it first. A.C.A. § 16-117-401(a) makes it the duty of the assignee to take immediate possession of the property "for the purpose of making an inventory and description of the property and for the care and preservation of the property." Possession comes first and preservation is named in the duty itself; the bond follows within ten days, in double the supposed value of the property, and it gates sale rather than possession. No other state in the footprint orders it that way.
Read articleHUD's Vacant Loan Sales offer pools of HECM notes secured by empty houses whose borrowers have died. The notes transfer without FHA insurance and with servicing released, which means the buyer owns the condition of several hundred scattered vacant properties from the transfer date.
Read articleSenior and specialty move management ends when the belongings are resolved and the client is settled. The house is still standing there, usually empty, often months from a sale. An operational account of where that seam falls and what the second job involves.
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