When Audrey Rutter and her sister inherited their childhood home in Tulsa, in 2023, Rutter had just graduated from a master’s program in Chicago. She was job hunting and planning a wedding, and her schedule was tight, as were her finances.
Her sister wanted to turn the home into a rental property, but the two-bedroom house in a disinvested neighborhood had not been well maintained. Their mother had bought the home for $38,000 in 1998, later adding upgrades like central air and heat. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and any extra funds she had went toward medical bills.
“It wasn’t a nice neighborhood,” recalled Rutter, who is 32. “But it did give us that sense of stability.”
Neither sister had the funds on hand to spruce up the house or buy the other out, and their differing opinions on what to do with their inheritance strained their relationship. Eventually, they decided to sell to a home-flipping company for $52,000.
Rutter didn’t try to negotiate. It wasn’t a terrible price for the area and the property’s condition, she reasoned. She used her half of the proceeds to pay for her wedding and act as a cushion while she pursued her job search in public housing policy.
“It was very stressful,” she said. “Once we had the offer, though, I felt a lot of relief. I just wanted to sell it and be done with it.”
The great housing transfer
Tens of trillions of dollars will be passed from older generations to younger ones in the coming decades as the “Great Wealth Transfer” unfolds in the United States. And homes will be a major part of that as skyrocketing prices make up an ever-larger share of people’s estates.
A record 340,000 homes were transferred through inheritance in the 12 months ending in August 2025, according to property data analytics company Cotality. Home resales overall were down during that same time period.
For many middle- and upper-class families, “the home is their biggest source of wealth,” said Peggy Sizow, chief fiduciary officer for National Advisors Trust, an independent trust company. She calls it “probably the most common asset that we see in estate planning, especially in today’s America.”
That may seem like a dream scenario for young Americans who are priced out of the market amid the nation’s affordability crisis, but Rutter’s experience shows it can be fraught.
Plenty of financial complications can arise: not just maintenance costs, but property taxes that heirs may not be able to afford, utility bills they need to cover and even property liens. Some heirs may be on the hook to pay their elders’ deferred property taxes out of the inherited estate, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. If they’re unable to do so, that could necessitate the sale of the home. Of course, cleaning out a home and preparing it for listing is not a cheap endeavor, either.
And depending on the number of family members involved, the inheritance can get even more complicated, financially and emotionally. Disputes over what to do are common, especially when siblings, for example, have differing incomes, goals and relationships to the property.
The best way to avoid financial surprises and family drama is to make a detailed plan — and have a conversation between generations — before a home is passed on, Sizow said. But many families put off the inevitable, whether because they cannot afford to retain legal help, don’t know to do so or don’t want to address their own mortality.
“When it comes to money, people are often very emotional,” she said. “Money brings out the best and the worst in people.”
The impact on intergenerational wealth
Still, there’s no denying the connection between homeownership and intergenerational wealth. Households that inherit property are more likely to become homeowners, and homeowners are more likely to have higher net worth than nonowners. They are also more likely to leave property to their children, in turn, continuing the wealth-building cycle.
“Because wealth compounds across generations, delays or exclusions from homeownership today can shape economic outcomes decades into the future,” according to a recent report from Realtor.com.
Roseanne Harvey was grateful to inherit her great-aunt’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2020. Though it is a humble two-bedroom house in what used to be a working-class neighborhood, real estate prices there have risen so drastically so quickly that Harvey said she would never have been able to buy property in her hometown.
While she acknowledges what a privilege her inheritance was, she said it also came with a “generational weight.” Her relative lived in the home for almost 70 years before passing it on to Harvey’s mother, and after she died in early 2020, Harvey spent most of the pandemic lockdown cleaning out her great-aunt’s belongings and renovating the house amid her grief and isolation. She cycled through emotions as she did — sadness, anger, resentment, pride — yet now thinks of the process as “healing.”
Were it not for her great-aunt’s desire that the home stay in the family, Harvey would have considered selling it. She and her partner have no children, which means the family wealth transfer may end with her.
“I’ve tried to approach it with reverence and a sense of, this is what they wanted. I’m carrying out their legacies and their wishes,” said Harvey, 50. “But there’s definitely duty and obligation attached to it.”
Similarly, when Chrissy Burgess and her two siblings inherited their aunt’s vacation home in Upstate New York, they were keen to keep it in the family and continue their annual Fourth of July parties. They wanted their own families to experience the same summers on the lake they had enjoyed growing up.
But the house had a number of problems, including a hole in the roof, broken windows, and bat and mice infestations. It was also much too small for all three of the siblings’ families to visit at the same time. Given their own homes and children to care for, the question was how much each could afford to put into the property — and what that meant for their share of ownership and future obligations.
After years of wrestling with what to do and many tense conversations, the siblings retained a lawyer to draft an operating agreement for how to manage house usage, upgrades and other considerations. They built an addition so the three families can visit at the same time from their respective homes in New York City, Philadelphia and Austin.
Burgess said they all understand they’re not likely to make their investment back if they were to sell.
“It’s a life disappointment to me that we’re not physically closer,” said Burgess, who lives in Brooklyn. “This is the way that we get to have our families together. It is complex, but it’s so meaningful.”
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