Nearly 1 in 5 (19%) U.S. homeowners says they either don’t have or aren’t sure they have a clear title and recorded deed to their home, according to a new survey.
Most homeowners may have little reason to think about those documents until they need them. But a title and deed are the legal records of who owns a home—and whether that ownership can be passed from one generation to the next.
“It causes a lot of damage later,” Rachel Gallegos, an attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, tells Realtor.com®.
On the eve of the Great Wealth Transfer, the stakes of having those records in place are only growing. Cerulli Associates estimates that Americans will transfer $124 trillion through 2048, including $105 trillion to heirs.
Homes will be among those assets changing hands. If the ownership records don’t change with them, a home can remain in a family for years before anyone realizes there is a problem.
The new survey, from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, offers a glimpse of how many homeowners may already be approaching that transfer with basic questions about their ownership unresolved.
How a home gets a tangled title
The ownership problems Gallegos handles at Community Legal Services have a name: tangled titles.
“Tangled title overall means you are living in a home and you are not the record owner,” Gallegos says.
The term can also encompass deed theft and adverse possession, but many of the families she represents are heirs to homes whose estates were never put through probate.
“People don’t realize … that you should probate so that you can gain access to homeownership opportunities,” Gallegos says.
But the process can be time-consuming and costly, and it hits families at an extremely vulnerable moment.
Gallegos says relatives may be dealing with it “in the midst of losing a loved one and all that grief and trauma,” while also “finding the funds to bury your person.”
Without another asset creating an immediate reason to open the estate, she says, families may not see why they need to do it.
“Let me go down to the register of wills office, pay a few hundred dollars to open an estate for what to do, what exactly?” Gallegos says, describing the question families can face.
Often, the reason becomes clear only when something else goes wrong. Gallegos says clients frequently arrive at her office with another problem already bearing down on the house: a mortgage foreclosure, property tax or utility debt, or repairs they cannot access.
A repair can expose years of unresolved ownership
It’s something Derrik Thomas learned firsthand from his own family’s experience.
Before he began working on tangled titles professionally, Thomas and his mother dealt with one involving their own family home in Pittsburgh.
“We want to fix up our home and do better, but we are not the record owner,” Thomas tells Realtor.com. “So it kind of limits what we can do with the property.”
Those limits most often appear in access to financial relief programs.
Heather Way, a clinical professor who directs the Housing Policy Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, recently reviewed 59 programs across 25 states. Some required applicants to have clear title. Others required the consent of additional heirs before assistance could be approved.
Thomas sees the same ownership problem surface in other ways, too. Today, he works as a program manager at Will Power, a program focused on estate planning and tangled-title prevention.
He says some families have lived in a home for years without realizing the title is unresolved. They may find out only when they apply for a homeowner benefit, such as a homestead exemption, and have to prove they are the legal owner.
Will Power tries to catch those problems earlier. It holds four to six workshops a month at community centers, senior centers, churches, and other nonprofit organizations. Thomas and his colleagues explain how families can clear a tangled title and refer those who need legal help to Community Legal Services.
But by the time a family needs to clear the title, doing so can carry a substantial cost.
Pew estimated that resolving a relatively straightforward tangled title through probate in Philadelphia would cost $9,198 for a home valued at $88,800 without subsidized legal assistance or fee waivers—about 10.4% of the home’s assessed value.
In some neighborhoods, the problem is concentrated
There is no national registry of every heirs’ property or tangled title in the United States, but researchers looking closely at individual housing markets have found thousands of affected homes.
Way and Noah Durst, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University, identified 10,048 single-family heirs’ properties across Dallas and Tarrant counties.
Together, those properties were worth more than $2.2 billion.
But what was more telling is where that wealth was concentrated: 43% of properties were located in just 10% of the two counties’ census tracts. The researchers found particularly high concentrations in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods with large shares of Black and Latino homeowners.
Philadelphia researchers found a similar pattern.
Pew identified at least 10,407 residential tangled-title properties worth more than $1.1 billion. More than half were located in North, Upper North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, even though those sections accounted for only about a third of the city’s residential properties.
Gallegos says the tangled titles her organization sees are “largely concentrated in Black and brown communities.”
She connects that pattern to the long history of unequal access to homeownership and wealth. Thomas points to another barrier: Low-income homeowners may see wills and estate planning as something meant for wealthy families, while the cost of probate and distrust of legal institutions can make formalizing ownership harder.
How a title problem becomes a wealth problem
Over time, those barriers can determine how much of the home a family actually controls—and whether one generation can pass the property intact to the next.
As ownership gets divided among more relatives, families can lose control over what happens to the home. By that point, the person living in the home may own only a share of it. A will can determine who inherits that share, but it cannot give away the portions that legally belong to other relatives.
“There is no will that we can draft to you that gives full ownership to your daughter or your grandkid or whoever you want it to have,” Gallegos says of some of the most complicated cases.
In Way and Durst’s study of property tax foreclosures in Dallas and Tarrant counties, heirs’ properties accounted for 52% of the tax-foreclosed single-family properties researchers examined in each county.
And some title problems cannot be fully resolved.
“Not every title can be untangled,” Gallegos says. “Sometimes it’s a delay, but sometimes it’s outright prevention, and that wealth is lost.”
That’s why Gallegos and Thomas are focused on preventing the problem before it starts.
“We realized, OK, untangling titles is one piece of it, but how do we prevent it? Estate planning,” she explains.
But it hasn’t been easy work. She says many people resist the idea because of its association with death: “We are all going to live forever. We don’t want to invite death. We don’t want to think about that,” she says.
Even people who understand the stakes can put it off—Gallegos says she didn’t have a will in place until the COVID-19 pandemic.
For eligible Philadelphia homeowners, Community Legal Services provides estate-planning assistance free of charge. Its attorneys prepare wills and other documents intended to help homeowners determine what happens to their property after death.
Affordable Housing Centers of Pennsylvania also offers free will preparation through its estate-planning work. The organization says it prepared 307 wills in 2025.
The difference in cost can be significant. A qualifying homeowner may pay nothing for that assistance. Pew estimated that resolving one relatively straightforward tangled title after death without assistance could cost about $9,200.
Thomas’ organization is now trying to introduce the idea at the beginning of homeownership. Affordable Housing Centers of Pennsylvania has begun incorporating estate planning into its first-time homebuyer work.
Thomas boils it down to one question: “Have you thought about who’s going to inherit your property?”
