The Homebuyer’s Corner
She Sold Her Inherited Property Without Evicting the Tenants & Still Bought a New Home
Written by Armando Novelo, NMLS 237243, a mortgage loan officer in West Covina with over 20 years of experience helping Southern California buyers.
You do not have to evict tenants to sell a home. And you do not have to wait until the sale closes to buy the next one. I know this because I just helped a client do both at the same time.
She inherited a home in El Monte, free and clear, no mortgage. The tenants living there had stopped paying rent. She was on a fixed income herself, which meant the rental income she had been counting on to help cover her own living expenses had simply stopped coming in. She could not afford the legal costs and the timeline of an eviction. She wanted to sell the inherited home and use the proceeds to buy a place of her own in Baldwin Park. The problem was she could not get the tenants to cooperate. They had stopped communicating with her entirely, which made everything from scheduling showings to coordinating closing logistics a challenge nobody had told her to prepare for.
Selling to an Investor Changed Everything
The thing most people in her situation do not realize is that eviction is not the only path forward when tenants will not leave.
California tenant protections make eviction expensive, slow, and emotionally brutal even when the legal grounds exist. For someone on a fixed income who cannot absorb months of legal fees and court timelines, it is simply not a realistic option. The tenants were not paying. They were not talking. And the clock was running on her ability to keep covering her own living costs without the rental income she had been counting on.
What she did instead was sell the El Monte home to an investor who purchased it with the tenants in place. Investors buy tenant-occupied properties regularly. It is not a distressed sale or a fire sale. It is a real transaction where the buyer understands and accepts the occupancy situation going in. The sale price was $600,000. The investor priced that offer knowing the tenants were there and that communication had been difficult. The number still worked for her.
The tenants did not have to be removed. They did not have to cooperate with showings in the traditional sense. The sale moved forward around them rather than depending on them, which was the only realistic path given how communication had broken down.
Bridging the Gap Between What She Sold and What She Needed
The El Monte home sold for $600,000. Because she inherited it free and clear with no mortgage, the full net proceeds after closing costs were hers. The home she wanted in Baldwin Park was priced at $805,000. That left a gap between what the sale would net and what she needed to complete the purchase. Understanding how equity from a property sale flows into a new purchase is something a lot of buyers do not fully grasp until they are in the middle of it. This article explains how equity works and how it gets applied, specifically in the section on accessing equity through a sale versus a refinance.
Here is where the financing structure mattered. Rather than waiting to see what the El Monte sale would net and then figuring out the purchase, we structured both transactions to close simultaneously. The conventional loan on the Baldwin Park purchase was underwritten to account for the equity coming from the El Monte sale, bridging the difference between the two price points in a way that did not require her to come out of pocket for the full gap. If you want to understand all the options available when buying and selling at the same time, this article covers the full range of strategies, specifically in the section on how simultaneous closes are structured.
A simultaneous close like this requires coordination between two escrow companies, two sets of agents, and two lenders, in this case the same lender on both sides, which simplified things significantly. The timing has to be precise. The El Monte sale funds needed to hit at the same time the Baldwin Park purchase was ready to fund. When one side moves slower than expected, the other side has to hold. That kind of coordination does not happen by accident. It requires everyone on the transaction knowing what the other side is doing and communicating constantly.
The tenants not communicating made parts of this harder than it needed to be. Scheduling the final walkthrough on the El Monte property required working around their refusal to engage, and there were moments where it looked like the coordination might slip. It did not. Both transactions closed on the same day.
What This Situation Teaches About Inherited Properties
Inheriting a home sounds like a windfall. In practice it often comes with complications that nobody prepares you for.
Tenants are one of the most common. Inherited homes are frequently occupied by long-term tenants who have been there for years, sometimes decades, and who may not feel any urgency to accommodate a new owner's plans. Some are cooperative. Some, like in this case, go silent and make everything harder.
The mistake most heirs make is assuming they need to resolve the tenant situation before they can do anything else. That assumption costs time and money and sometimes derails the whole plan. The real question is not how do I get them out but what type of buyer will purchase this property as it exists right now. Investors are that buyer. They do this regularly and in a market like the SGV where rental properties hold real value, there is no shortage of buyers willing to take on an occupied property at the right price.
The other mistake is treating the sale and the purchase as two sequential transactions when they can often be structured simultaneously. Waiting to close the sale before starting the purchase search adds months to the timeline and removes the financing flexibility that a simultaneous structure provides. And for anyone going into a transaction like this, understanding what closing costs look like on both sides of a simultaneous deal is essential before the numbers are finalized. This article breaks down exactly what closing costs cover, specifically in the section on what buyers most commonly underestimate.
If she had waited, rates could have moved, the Baldwin Park home could have sold to someone else, and her timeline would have been entirely dependent on how quickly the tenant situation resolved.
It did not resolve. The tenants never cooperated. She still got her new home.
Armando Novelo, NMLS 237243, is a mortgage loan officer at Super Mortgage Bros, powered by Golden Empire Mortgage. He has been helping Southern California buyers and homeowners since 2002. His office is located in West Covina, CA.
Article Published: August 18, 2026
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Armando Novelo
NMLS 237243
Super Mortgage Bros
1900 W. Garvey Ave S. #100
West Covina, CA 91790
Phone: (626) 200-1838
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