State Incentives to Clear Title and Facilitate Property Transfer

Owning land as heirs’ property, sometimes called family land, is a tenuous type of ownership that often leaves landowners unable to fully capitalize on their real property. When landowners own property as heirs’ property, they own it as tenants in common. In Vermont, this means each individual co-owner owns an undivided interest in the whole property; they each hold a share of the property rather than a specific geographic portion of it. In the context of agriculture, this can make it difficult for farmers to generate income from their land. Farmers working on heirs’ property land might also be vulnerable to losing the land to competing uses. Heirs’ property ownership is further complicated by a problem known as clouded title, which arises when title to the property remains in the name of a deceased ancestor because the deed was never effectively transferred to the heirs.

Since Vermont is a predominantly rural state where land might be passed between generations, one could assume that Vermont might have high rates of heirs’ property. However, some research has shown that Vermont’s rate of heirs’ property and clouded title is manageably low. While the anomalous results may be due to the state’s methods of tracking property data, interviews with practitioners suggest the research is accurate. These practitioners, including a lister (Vermont’s term for a tax assessor), a probate judge, and lawyers representing many decades of experience in real estate and probate law, point to the state’s cultural attributes as well as its legal frameworks to explain why they rarely see heirs’ property in their practice. First, Vermont residents have high levels of access to both officials who manage land records and to legal services. In addition, practitioners point to a variety of legal mechanisms that either prevent heirs’ property, incentivize clearing title, or allow clouded title to be remediated expeditiously. This case study explains these mechanisms in detail.

After a brief background on the issues that arise from holding land as heirs’ property, this case study considers the various aspects of Vermont’s unique cultural and legal landscape that contribute to the state’s relatively low rates of clouded title. It then examines the frequent use of deeds to avoid probate and thereby prevent clouded title issues from arising. Next, this resource examines how Vermont’s property tax system strongly incentivizes clearing title. Finally, it examines several methods for correcting clouded title that do not require a full probate process. Each of these elements may hold lessons for other jurisdictions that want to prevent and resolve the issues that arise for heirs’ property owners.

This brief was co-authored by Christina Reiter LLM’25 and Francine Miller LLM’17, Senior Staff Attorney and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS). It was produced for the Farmland Access Legal Toolkit, a project of CAFS at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Greg Fox, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid, reviewed this resource. Additional review was provided by the CAFS team: Austin Price, Communications Manager; Lihlani Nelson, Deputy Director and Senior Researcher; and Laurie Beyranevand, Director.