Selling a Jonesboro Home Held in a Living Trust

A parent set up a revocable living trust years ago so the family would not have to go through probate. The parent has passed. You are named as the successor trustee. Now you are standing in the house in Jonesboro wondering whether you are actually allowed to sell it, and who you have to ask first.

The short answer is that you probably can, and the process is usually simpler than probate. But it runs on paperwork that most sellers have never heard of, and the time to gather that paperwork is before the sign goes in the yard, not after you have an offer. At NEA Realtor Group, Trenton Hoggard and Tim Ray walk trustees through this a few times a year, and the deals that go smoothly are always the ones where the documents were pulled together up front.

Here is what a successor trustee in Northeast Arkansas needs to know before listing. One note before we start: we are real estate agents, not attorneys or CPAs. Trust language varies, and this article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Your estate planning attorney should read the actual trust. Our job is to tell you what the sale will require so nothing catches you sideways at the closing table. If you want the broader view of how we handle a sale start to finish, our home selling toolkit lays out the full process.

Know Which Kind of Trust You Are Dealing With

Not every trust behaves the same way, and the first question is always which one is on the deed.

• Revocable living trust, settlor still living. The person who created it (the settlor) can usually sell the house themselves, because they kept the power to revoke and control it. If they are competent, they sign.
• Revocable living trust, settlor deceased. The trust generally becomes irrevocable at death and the successor trustee steps in. This is the most common situation we see.
• Revocable living trust, settlor alive but incapacitated. The successor trustee may take over, but the trust almost always spells out how incapacity gets proven, often with letters from physicians.
• Irrevocable trust from the start. These are usually built for asset protection or tax planning, and the trustee's authority can be narrower. Read the document carefully.

Which bucket you are in changes who signs, what title needs, and sometimes whether beneficiaries have to be notified before you can accept an offer.

Confirm the House Is Actually In the Trust

This is the single biggest surprise, and it is worth checking on day one.

Plenty of people pay an attorney to draft a trust, sign it, put it in a drawer, and never deed the house into it. The trust exists. The house was never funded into it. In that case the trust does not own the home and you cannot sell as trustee, no matter what the trust says.

The test is the deed, not the trust. Pull the last recorded deed and look at the grantee. You are looking for language like "the Jane Doe Revocable Trust dated March 4, 2011." If the deed still reads with only an individual name on it, the house is outside the trust and you are likely headed to probate or another transfer route instead.

If that is where you land, the path looks a lot more like our guide on how to sell an inherited house in Jonesboro, which walks through probate, personal representatives, and beneficiary deeds. Find this out in week one, not the week of closing.

Read the Trust for the Power to Sell

Arkansas adopted the Arkansas Trust Code in 2005, and it gives trustees broad default authority. Under Arkansas Code section 28-73-816, a trustee may "acquire or sell property, for cash or on credit, at public or private sale," along with a long list of related powers like insuring the property, making repairs, and signing the instruments needed to get it done.

That is the default. The trust document can narrow it.

Things to look for while you read:

• Does the trust name you specifically as successor trustee, or does it name a bank, a sibling, or a series of people in order?
• Are there co-trustees, and if so, must all of them sign or can any one act alone?
• Does it require beneficiary consent, notice, or an appraisal before real estate can be sold?
• Does it give a beneficiary the right to live in the home or buy it first?
• Is there a stated minimum price or a prohibition on selling to a related party?

A restriction buried on page eleven is much cheaper to find now than after you are under contract.

The Certification of Trust Keeps the Rest Private

Most trustees do not want to hand a full trust document, including who gets what, to a title company, a buyer, or a lender. Arkansas has a tool for exactly that.

Under Arkansas Code section 28-73-1013, instead of furnishing a copy of the trust instrument, a trustee may furnish a certification of trust. That document states that the trust exists and when it was executed, identifies the settlor and the currently acting trustee, describes the trustee's powers, says whether the trust is revocable, explains whether co-trustees must all sign, and describes how title is held.

Two details matter for you. First, the statute says a certification "need not contain the dispositive terms of a trust," which is the legal way of saying nobody gets to see who inherits what. Second, the recipient can still require copies of the specific excerpts that name you as trustee and give you power to act in this transaction. So expect to share a few pages, not the whole book.

Your attorney prepares this. Ask for it early, because it is usually the document that holds everything else up.

What the Title Company Will Ask For

Every closing office runs its own checklist, but for a trust sale in Northeast Arkansas you should plan on gathering some version of the following:

• The recorded deed showing the trust as the owner of record
• A certified copy of the settlor's death certificate
• The certification of trust, signed and notarized
• Trust excerpts naming you as successor trustee and granting the power to sell
• Any acceptance of trusteeship or resignation documents for a trustee ahead of you in line
• The trust's tax identification number, since a revocable trust typically starts using its own after the settlor's death
• Photo identification for every person signing

Order a certified death certificate copy as early as you can and get more than one. Several parties will want their own, and waiting on a single copy to circulate is a slow way to lose a week.

How You Sign Everything

You are not selling your house. The trust is selling its house, and you are acting for it. That changes every signature line from the listing agreement forward.

The seller name on the listing agreement and the purchase contract should be the trust, written exactly as the deed writes it, including the date of the trust. Your signature block reads in the form of your name, then "Successor Trustee of the" and the trust name and date.

Signing your personal name alone on a trust-owned property is a defect that title will catch, and fixing it late means chasing a notary while a lender waits. Tell your agent up front that the property is held in trust so the paperwork is built correctly from the first document instead of corrected on the sixth.

Where Trust Sales Actually Get Stuck

In our experience the trust itself is rarely the problem. The delays come from the edges around it.

• A trustee ahead of you never formally declined. If a sibling was named first and simply is not doing it, title usually wants a signed resignation or declination, not a phone call.
• The deed into the trust was recorded with an error. A misspelled trust name or a wrong trust date creates a gap in the chain that has to be corrected.
• A mortgage was never released. A loan paid off years ago that was never satisfied of record is one of the most common title problems we see, and it is not unique to trusts.
• Amendments nobody can find. If the trust was amended twice, title wants all of it, and the second amendment is usually in a different drawer.
• Co-trustees in different states. Solvable, but it needs planning for mail-away signing and notarization.

Several of these overlap with the broader list in our post on title problems that can delay your Jonesboro closing. The pattern is the same: almost all of it is fixable, and almost all of it is faster to fix in August than during the week you were supposed to close.

The Tax Side, in Plain Terms

Talk to a CPA before you sell. That said, two federal rules come up in almost every trust conversation, and knowing they exist helps you ask better questions.

Basis after a death

The IRS states that the basis of property inherited from someone who has died is generally the fair market value of the property on the date of death, whether or not an estate tax return is filed. The IRS guidance on gifts and inheritances lays this out, along with an alternate valuation date option that applies only if an estate tax return is filed and that election is made.

In practical terms, a home bought in 1994 and sold by a trustee in 2026 is often measured against its value at the date of death rather than the 1994 purchase price. That frequently means far less taxable gain than families expect. It also means the date of death value is worth documenting properly rather than guessing at later.

The homeowner exclusion

If the settlor is still living and the home is in a revocable trust they control, the familiar personal residence exclusion may still be in play. IRS Topic 701 describes excluding up to $250,000 of gain, or up to $500,000 on a joint return, when the ownership and use tests are met over the five year period ending on the sale date.

That exclusion is tied to a person's use of the home as a main residence, so it generally does not transfer to a successor trustee selling after a death. This is exactly the kind of question worth one paid hour with a CPA before you list.

Pricing a Home You May Not Know Well

Trustees are often pricing a house they have not lived in for decades. Two things make that harder here than in a big metro.

First, sales volume in the Jonesboro area is thin enough that a credible comparative market analysis often has to reach back 90 to 180 days to find genuinely similar sales. In a subdivision with slow turnover, or on acreage, it can stretch further. That is normal for this market, and it is not a sign of a lazy analysis. It does mean your agent should be able to name the specific properties they used and explain why. If they cannot, ask.

Second, the backdrop right now is a buyer with more choices than a few years ago. The National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales slipped 2.0% in August 2026 and were unchanged year over year in the South, with months of supply at 4.9 and described by chief economist Lawrence Yun as the highest in over ten years. Financing costs are part of that story: Freddie Mac put the 30 year fixed rate mortgage at 6.76% as of September 10, 2026, up from 6.35% a year earlier.

Locally the picture is steadier than the national headline suggests. Redfin reports a median sale price of about $235,000 in Jonesboro over the three months ending August 2026, up 2.1% year over year, with homes going under contract in a median of 54 days compared to 66 days a year earlier.

The trustee lesson in all of that is simple. You have a duty to the beneficiaries to get a defensible price, and a defensible price comes from real comparable sales and a realistic read of condition, not from what a cousin thinks the house is worth.

Condition, Disclosure, and the Inspection

Arkansas disclosure practice leans on what the seller actually knows. A trustee who has not lived in the house frequently knows very little, and saying so honestly is better than guessing.

That is the argument for a pre-listing inspection on a trust-owned home. Expect roughly $500 to $1,000 for a standard single family home in this market, with $800 to $1,200 or more for a larger house, a crawlspace, or add-on services like a sewer scope, radon, or well and septic. National guides often quote lower numbers that do not match what inspectors here actually charge.

Paying for that report up front does two useful things. It tells you what you are selling before a buyer's inspector tells you in the form of a repair demand. And it gives you documentation supporting the price you accepted, which matters if a beneficiary questions the decision later.

One Arkansas item to plan for: a termite letter, or wood destroying insect report. Here you should assume it will be required for essentially any financed purchase, not just VA and USDA. National articles that describe it as optional on conventional and FHA loans unless an appraiser flags something do not reflect how this market works. The realistic exceptions are an in-house portfolio loan from a local bank keeping the note on its own books, or a cash buyer. On a home that has been empty or lightly occupied, this is worth handling early rather than discovering a problem eleven days before closing.

Carrying the House While It Is Listed

The trust keeps paying for the home until it closes, and those costs come out of what the beneficiaries eventually receive.

• Insurance. Call the carrier and tell them the owner has died and the home may be unoccupied. Many policies restrict coverage once a house has been vacant for a set period, and that threshold and the list of suspended perils vary by carrier and policy form. Ask directly what your policy requires and what it would cost to keep full coverage in force.
• Utilities. Leave them on. An inspector cannot evaluate a furnace, water heater, or plumbing with the power and water off, and an appraiser may note it too.
• Property taxes. Keep them current. A delinquency shows up in the title search and gets paid at closing either way.
• HOA dues. If the home is in an association, dues in Jonesboro and the surrounding area typically run about $100 to $300 per year for most single family neighborhoods, toward the higher end where there is a pool or gated access. Note that is annual. National guides usually quote monthly figures in the hundreds, and that framing does not fit this market.
• Lawn and basic upkeep. An obviously unattended yard tells every buyer who drives by that nobody is minding the property, and it invites lower offers.

Offers, Earnest Money, and Beneficiaries

One local expectation to reset early, because it comes up in nearly every trust conversation: earnest money here is not what national articles describe.

The large majority of deals in Northeast Arkansas do not include earnest money at all. When a buyer does put earnest money down, $1,000 is the most common figure. The high end Trenton has personally seen is around $5,000, and that is usually a luxury transaction at $500,000 and above. These are observed patterns rather than rules, and any individual deal can be negotiated differently.

Do not write to a percentage of the purchase price. That is national framing and it is wrong for this market. If a beneficiary pushes you to demand a large deposit as protection, the honest answer is that a deposit is not where your protection lives. Verified financing, tight contingency deadlines, and a buyer whose lender will actually answer the phone are what keep a deal from falling apart.

On the beneficiary side, communication prevents most problems. Send the same information to everyone at the same time. Share the analysis behind the list price, tell them what the inspection found, and explain why you accepted the offer you accepted. Trustees rarely get in trouble for the price. They get in trouble for silence.

How We Market a Trust-Owned Listing

A trust sale is a normal sale once the paperwork is squared away, and it deserves normal marketing rather than a quiet, discounted exit.

Every NEA Realtor Group listing gets professional photography, full syndication, and a dedicated direct mail campaign built specifically for that property. On an older home in an established neighborhood, mail earns its keep more than people expect, because the person most likely to buy on that street is often already connected to it and is not scrolling listings every morning.

The other thing we do is keep a trustee out of the weeds. You have a document list, a CPA question, and probably siblings with opinions. Coordinating the inspection, the termite letter, the appraisal access, and the closing schedule is our part of the job.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I have to go through probate to sell a home held in a living trust in Arkansas?

Generally no, and avoiding probate is usually the whole reason the trust was created. If the deed shows the trust as owner and you are the acting successor trustee with power to sell, the sale proceeds outside probate. If the home was never deeded into the trust, that is a different situation and probate may be necessary.

Q: Should I transfer the house out of the trust to the beneficiaries before selling?

Usually not, and not without advice. Deeding the property out to several people first means every one of them has to sign the listing agreement, the contract, and the closing documents, which multiplies the coordination. Selling from the trust and distributing cash is generally cleaner, but your attorney and CPA should confirm that for your situation.

Q: How long does a trust sale take compared to a normal sale in Jonesboro?

Once the documents are in hand, the timeline looks like any other sale. The variable is entirely on the front end: how long it takes to locate the trust and any amendments, get the certification of trust prepared, and obtain certified death certificates. Start that work before you list and the sale itself should not run long.

Trenton Hoggard and Tim Ray lead NEA Realtor Group, which holds 5-star reviews from clients across the region and ranks as the #1 real estate team in the Northeast Arkansas MLS by production.