How Long Does Probate Take in Los Angeles County?

The short answer: a straightforward California probate typically runs somewhere between nine and eighteen months, and Los Angeles County sits at the slower end of that because of court calendar congestion. Anything contested, or any estate with a messy asset, runs longer — sometimes years.

The more useful answer is that you usually don't have to wait for probate to finish before selling the house. Most people carrying a house they inherited don't know that, and they spend a year paying taxes, insurance and utilities on an empty property because someone told them their hands were tied.

First — check whether you need probate at all

Before anything else, find out how the property was actually held. Several situations skip probate entirely:

• The house was in a living trust. No probate. The successor trustee can sell, subject to the trust terms. This is the single most common thing people get wrong — they assume "there's a will" means probate, when a trust means the opposite.
• Joint tenancy with right of survivorship. Title passes to the surviving joint tenant by operation of law.
• Community property with right of survivorship, or a surviving spouse who can use a Spousal Property Petition — a much shorter court process than full probate.
• A recorded transfer-on-death deed. Less common, but they exist.

Pull the vesting off the last recorded deed before you do anything else. It's a public record, it takes ten minutes, and it can save you a year.

What the timeline actually looks like

Assuming you do need full probate, roughly:

• Petition to first hearing. You file, and the court sets a hearing. In LA County that date is commonly a couple of months out, sometimes more depending on the branch.
• Letters issued. At or after the hearing, the court appoints the personal representative and issues Letters. Until you have Letters, you have no authority to do anything with the house — not sell it, not sign for it.
• Creditor claim period. Four months from issuance of Letters, running in the background.
• Inventory and appraisal. A court-appointed probate referee values the real property. This number matters — it becomes the benchmark for what the court considers a fair sale price.
• Petition for final distribution and a final hearing. Another wait for a court date.

Add it up and nine to eighteen months is realistic for something clean. Meanwhile the house needs insurance — and vacant-property insurance is expensive and often harder to place than owners expect.

The distinction that decides everything: full vs. limited authority

When the court appoints you, it grants authority under the Independent Administration of Estates Act — either full or limited. Look at your Letters. It says which one you have. This single line determines how painful selling the house will be.

Full authority

You can sell the property without a court confirmation hearing. You serve a Notice of Proposed Action on the people entitled to it, wait out the objection window, and if nobody objects, you close like a normal transaction. Weeks, not months. No courtroom.

Limited authority

The sale has to be confirmed by the court, which means a hearing — and at that hearing the sale is subject to overbidding. Anyone can show up and bid your buyer up in open court, starting from a minimum overbid calculated off the accepted price. Buyers know this. It's why serious buyers sometimes won't engage with a limited-authority probate at all: they'd be doing the inspections and the work of finding the deal, only to be outbid by someone who walked in that morning.

If you're heading into probate and the estate's main asset is a house you intend to sell, this is worth raising with your attorney at the petition stage. Full authority is often available for the asking, and it is worth a great deal.

The costs of waiting

An inherited Valley house sitting empty for a year isn't neutral. You're carrying property taxes, vacant-property insurance at a premium, utilities, yard maintenance, and any mortgage still on it. Empty houses in the Valley also attract attention — copper theft, squatters, a break-in that turns into an insurance claim and a code enforcement file.

And there's the condition drift. A house that was tired but livable when someone passed is, twelve months later, a house with a roof leak nobody caught.

What we do with probate properties

We buy them at every stage, including before Letters have issued, with a contract that's contingent on the authority coming through. We can wait for the court. We don't need financing, an appraisal, or a loan contingency, and we don't ask you to clean the house out — if the garage is full of forty years of belongings, leave it. Take what matters to you and leave the rest.

What we won't do is tell you probate is simpler than it is. If you don't have Letters yet, we can't close yet either. Anyone promising otherwise is telling you what you want to hear.