You Inherited a House in Fairfax County and the Other Heirs Won’t Sell

Virginia does not work the way Maryland and the District do, and the difference matters most to the co-owner who does not want to sell. There is no Virginia right to buy out the relative who is demanding a sale. What Virginia gives you instead is a rule about price: if the house is sold, it is sold on the open market at a court-determined value, not knocked down at an auction.

Investors: we don’t publish or sell heir lists, and we name no one from a probate record. This page is for the family that owns the house.

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The Thing Most Pages Get Wrong About Virginia

Maryland and the District both passed heirs-property acts that give a specific right: a co-owner who did not ask for a sale can buy out the ones who did, at appraised value, on a fixed clock. Our main guide to co-owners who can’t agree sets that out in full.

Virginia did not do that. There is no Virginia heirs-property act and no statutory definition of “heirs property.” If you have read that Maryland buyout right and assumed it protects you here, it does not.

What Virginia did instead, in 2020, was rewrite ordinary partition law. The protections are real, but they work on a different axis. Maryland asks who gets to buy. Virginia asks what price the sale has to clear.

Virginia’s Protection Is the Price, Not the Option

If co-owners cannot agree, any of them can ask a court to divide the property. Before anything is sold, the court has to establish what the property is worth, and the statute is specific about how.

First, a real valuation

The court orders an appraisal by a disinterested real estate appraiser licensed in the Commonwealth, valuing the property as though one person owned it outright. Parties get 30 days to object, and a hearing follows no sooner than 31 days after that notice goes out. Two exceptions shorten it: if everyone agrees on a value or on a method of reaching one, the court adopts it; and if the court decides the appraisal would cost more than it is worth as evidence, it sets the value itself after a hearing.

Then the court tries not to sell at all

Virginia’s order of remedies puts a sale last. The court cannot allot or sell an undivided interest until it finds that dividing the property physically is not practicable — which is nearly always true of a single-family house, but it is a finding the court has to make rather than assume. Only then does it consider giving the whole property to a party willing to take it at the appraised value, then partial allotment with a sale of the remainder, then a sale of everything.

That middle step is the closest Virginia comes to Maryland’s buyout, and the difference is worth being precise about. Maryland’s is a right belonging to the co-owners who did not ask for a sale, on a 45-day clock. Virginia’s allotment is available to any party who will accept the property at the appraised value, and the court chooses between competing claimants.

What the court weighs when more than one of you wants it

Virginia’s statute lists what the court considers, and the list will look familiar to anyone in a family standoff:

• how long the party and their predecessors have owned or possessed the property;
• any sentimental or ancestral attachment to it;
• the party’s current lawful use, and the harm to them if that use had to stop;
• each party’s contributions to taxes, insurance, maintenance and improvements;
• any other relevant factor.

No single factor can be treated as decisive without weighing the whole picture. Practically, that means the sibling who has been living in the house has something real to point to — and so does the sibling who has been quietly paying the taxes on a house they do not live in. Receipts count here.

Two of you can act as one

One provision gets overlooked and is worth knowing when a family splits two-against-one. Virginia’s partition statute allows two or more parties to elect to have their shares laid off together, rather than each carved out separately.

That matters because these standoffs are rarely one person against everyone. More often three siblings agree and a fourth does not, and each of the three has been treating their fraction as a separate problem. Combined, they are a majority interest that can be dealt with as a single block — which changes both the arithmetic of a buyout and how a court sees the shape of the case.

The same section is broader than most people assume about who can start a partition at all. It is not only the co-owners: coparceners, an executor with a power of sale, and in some circumstances a lien creditor or the owner of an undivided estate can compel one. If someone outside your immediate family has told you they can force this, they may be right, and it is worth finding out which of those they are before you respond.

If a number would settle it, that is a phone call. An offer costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

And if it does sell: open market, at the court’s number

This is the part worth knowing before anyone panics about a courthouse auction. Under Virginia law a sale in a partition action shall be an open-market sale unless the court finds that sealed bids or an auction would be more economically advantageous.

The court appoints a broker — one the parties agree on within ten days, or a disinterested licensed broker if they cannot agree. The broker offers the property at the value the court determined, for a marketing period the court sets, and must obtain an offer of at least that determined value. If no such offer arrives in a reasonable time, the court can approve a lower offer, redetermine the value, or switch to sealed bids or an auction.

So the floor is the appraised number, listed by a licensed broker, on the open market. That is a materially better outcome than the courthouse-steps auction most families are imagining, and it is the single most useful thing to know about Virginia partition. It is also why the fight in Virginia is usually about the valuation rather than about the sale.

Three Offices, Two Buildings, One Court

Fairfax is simpler than Maryland in one way and stranger in another.

Simpler: Virginia has no Orphans’ Court. The same Fairfax Circuit Court that qualifies the estate also hears a partition — the statute gives partition to any court with general equity jurisdiction, which is the Circuit Court. One court, not two. A Maryland reader who has learned to keep the Register of Wills and the Orphans’ Court straight does not need that distinction here.

Stranger: there is a third office with no Maryland equivalent, and it is not in the courthouse.

The Probate Division — where you qualify

Estates are qualified at the Fairfax Circuit Court’s Probate Division, in the Fairfax County Courthouse at 4110 Chain Bridge Road, Suite 401, Fairfax, VA 22030. Qualification is by appointment. We are deliberately not printing a phone number for this division: two official sources currently publish different numbers for it, and rather than guess we would rather send you to the court’s own page — fairfaxcounty.gov/circuit/probate/administration-of-estates — which carries the current contact details.

The Commissioner of Accounts — where the clocks live

This is the office that surprises people. The Commissioner of Accounts for the Fairfax Circuit Court supervises fiduciaries after they qualify, and it is a separate office at a different address — 10400 Eaton Place, Suite 450, Fairfax, VA 22030, (703) 667-4900. You qualify at the courthouse; you then file with the Commissioner, somewhere else entirely.

Two deadlines run from the date of qualification, and they are statutory rather than a matter of local practice:

• The inventory is due within four months of the order conferring authority, filed with the Commissioner of Accounts.
• The first account is due within sixteen months of qualification, and it must cover the first twelve months.

A personal representative who misses these has a real problem, and it is a separate problem from whatever the family is arguing about. If you are the one who qualified, those two dates belong in your calendar before anything else does.

Tell us where the estate stands and who is on the deed. We will tell you straight what we can and can’t do.

What It Costs in Fairfax

Virginia charges probate differently from Maryland, and if you have read our Prince George’s page the shape will not transfer. Maryland uses a bracket table keyed to estate value. Virginia charges a rate.

On the Fairfax Circuit Court’s current fiduciary and probate fee schedule, the state probate tax is $0.10 per $100 of estate value, with a $25.00 local tax in lieu of probate tax. Alongside those sit smaller recording charges — a $1.00 real estate transfer fee per parcel, an $8.00 Technology Trust Fund charge and a $10.00 Court Technology Fund charge.

Those are probate and recording charges. The Circuit Court civil filing fee for a partition is separate from them — confirm the current amount with the Clerk of the Circuit Court when you file.

The larger costs in a contested Virginia partition are the appraisal, the court-appointed broker’s commission on any open-market sale, and counsel. Those are not fixed by a schedule and depend on the property and the fight.

Free and no-obligation. If the better move is keeping the house or waiting, we will tell you that.

If There Are Liens on the House

In an ordinary sale — the kind that happens when the owners agree, or when they sell to a buyer like us — recorded liens, delinquent taxes and settlement costs are identified in the title search and paid from the proceeds at settlement through the title company. Where the sale covers what’s owed, the funded closing pays the debt. A lien reduces what the family walks away with; it does not by itself stop a sale from happening.

A court-ordered partition sale is a different animal, and Virginia handles it narrowly: where there are liens on one party’s interest, a lienholder can petition the court to have that party’s share of the proceeds applied to the debt. That is a discretionary power, aimed at one owner’s share rather than at the property as a whole. If liens are the main obstacle, that distinction is worth raising with a Virginia attorney early.

When You Want a Virginia Lawyer

This page is a map, not advice. If a partition has been threatened or filed, if you are the party who wants to take the house at the appraised value, if the valuation itself is the fight, or if an owner cannot be found — that is work for a Virginia probate or partition attorney licensed in the Commonwealth, brought in before a contract is signed rather than after. We are not one, we do not provide legal advice, and we will say plainly when what you have needs a lawyer rather than a buyer.

Where We Fit

We are a buyer. We purchase houses directly, for our own account, in Fairfax County and across Virginia, Maryland, the District and Florida. We are not a law firm or a probate service, we do not represent anyone before the Circuit Court or the Commissioner of Accounts, and we have no role in a partition action.

We can sometimes purchase an individual heir’s interest directly. Whether that works depends on the title, the other heirs’ rights under state law, and the numbers — tell us what you own and we’ll tell you straight whether it’s something we can buy.

More often, what a Fairfax family needs first is a number they did not have to argue about. Virginia’s whole scheme runs on a valuation, and knowing what the house actually converts to in cash — before an appraiser is appointed and the meter starts — changes the conversation. Sometimes it ends the standoff, because the sibling who wants to keep it finally knows what taking it at value costs. That outcome is fine with us.

We buy as-is: no repairs, no clean-out, nothing to fix in a house several people are arguing about. We cover normal closing costs and an offer costs nothing. Most of our closings take two to three weeks, and we have closed in as little as seven days when title was ready — but an unqualified estate, an owner who cannot be found or a pending partition takes considerably longer, and nobody can promise you a closing date against a court’s calendar. We won’t.

Tell us what the Fairfax house is and where the estate stands. We will tell you plainly what we can and can’t do.

Official Contacts — Verify Everything Here

If the property taxes have fallen behind while the estate sits, that clock runs on its own schedule — our Fairfax County tax delinquency guide covers what Virginia’s judicial-sale process actually looks like. For the estate path itself, see our Fairfax County probate guide.

Tell Us What You’re Holding

How many owners, whether anyone has qualified at the courthouse yet, and what everyone wants. That is enough for us to tell you whether there is a transaction here — and if there isn’t one yet, what has to happen first.

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