When the House Is the Entire Estate
West University Place is a small city, roughly two square miles and about 15,000 residents, and it is unusual in one way that matters enormously for probate: almost everyone owns, almost everyone has owned for a long time, and the home is frequently worth more than everything else in the estate combined. Houston probate attorney Kyle Robbins sees the same pattern here repeatedly. A single high-value house, adult children who live in different cities, and no obvious way to divide one lot three ways.
Texas does not leave families stuck. Any co-owner can compel a partition under Texas Property Code Section 23.001. Courts prefer to divide land physically, called partition in kind, and under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 770 a court that finds no fair and equitable division can be made will order a sale and divide the proceeds. On a West U lot, physical division is almost never realistic.
What most families are never told is that inherited property is treated differently. The Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act, Chapter 23A of the Property Code, applies when the co-owners inherited their interests from a relative and no agreement governs partition. Three siblings who inherited a parent’s home usually fit that definition exactly. It changes the outcome in three concrete ways. The court orders an appraisal before anything else. The co-owners who want to keep the home then have 45 days to buy out the ones asking for a sale, at appraised value. And if a sale still has to happen, it is an open-market sale through a broker rather than an execution sale.
That is the difference between a family losing the house on the courthouse steps and one sibling keeping it at a fair number. It is also the reason to get advice before anyone files anything.
The Tax Ceiling Does Not Survive the Owner
If the owner was 65 or older, school property taxes on the home were frozen at a ceiling under Texas Tax Code Section 11.26, and Harris County has adopted an over-65 ceiling of its own. Many West U homes have carried that freeze for years while values around them climbed.
It does not simply pass down. Section 11.26(c) provides that the limitation expires when no owner who qualified for the exemption is still living in the home. A surviving spouse who was at least 55 when the owner died can generally keep it, under Section 11.26(i), provided the home was and remains that spouse’s residence homestead. Children and other heirs cannot.
The practical consequence is a tax bill that can rise in the first January after the death, on a house the family may already be struggling to decide about. None of it is automatic either. Someone has to file with the Harris Central Appraisal District, and heirs are asked to provide an ownership affidavit, the death certificate, and supporting records. Which exemption amounts carry across to a surviving spouse is more technical than most summaries admit, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Your City Is Not Houston, and It Does Not Change the Court
West University Place has its own mayor and council, and so does Southside Place, the quarter square mile city next door. Both sit entirely inside Harris County, and both use Houston mailing addresses. So the answer to the venue question is short: your case is filed in the Harris County Probate Courts downtown, the same as any Houston address, and there is no county line running through this part of town.
Worth noting for anyone comparing addresses: Rice Village, Southampton, and Boulevard Oaks share the 77005 ZIP but sit in the City of Houston rather than in West U. It makes no difference to probate venue. It makes a considerable difference to a title search.
Why Not Just Hire the Firm Down the Street?
Proximity is not the variable here. Every Harris County probate runs through the same five courts, and most uncontested matters run over Zoom and by electronic filing. What differs is whether the attorney has handled the version of your situation where the estate is one house and the heirs do not agree.
That case is not a routine administration. It touches estate litigation, the heirs’ property buyout timeline, and the appraisal that sets the number everyone argues about. Handled early it usually resolves without a courtroom. Handled late, after someone has filed or after the tax bill arrives, the family has fewer options and less leverage.
If you are the executor and you can already tell the siblings are not aligned, that is the call to make. We will tell you what applies, what it is likely to cost, and what happens next, at no charge.