EZ-Probate Joins Trust & Will: Ex Parte Petitions and Faster Probate Sales, with Byron Batres

0:00 La probate expert and this is our weekly thursday afternoon probate weekly live stream we get together every thursday 4 p.m pacific 7 p.m eastern everything in between on either side we talk about all things probate whether you're investor or a wholesaler a real estate agent looking to build your business or a family member executor administrator or attorney or vendor let you get together and talk about all things probate to help us all make more money create more income more wealth for ourselves and be a better service to our community and family members so a couple things i want to announce just real quick since i'm looking for my our guest i know i talked to him he's on his way in here so we'll just hold our breath and hope that all works out but let me share with you real quick a couple things we have working on this week i think are worthy of your attention first a special program for probate weekly members it's going to be prospect court networking now i'm sorry a probate court networking so you may know that my first coach was chad corbett and he beckons all the leads and then i followed him over to probate mastery and so he's asked me to do a module on what i did to build my business which was through networking at the probate court so i'm going to record that material on wednesday july 6th and i'll put the event the link in the chat box but if you are on this call there's a limited number of tickets we're selling it for 99. but if you are on this call and use the probate code probate weekly no space probate weekly when you get there as a promo code it's free i'd love to have a group looking to have about 100 people total so i can record the material and make it interactive and give you guys a chance to ask questions but if you're looking to build your business and i think particularly in these days to do it in ways that don't cost a lot of money but hopefully will be cost effective for you and time wisely cost effective for you here's a chance so we're going to do probing court networking this will be a

2:03 Module of the upcoming urn class in probate mastery i think that program is also being launched it's a pre-launch price ending today at and so it's a fantastic program a lot of superstars in the property business and i'm not getting paid for the 99 dollars frankly just to create value for it i'm not sure i'm doing it for money but on the earned program i'm not getting paid for it at all i'm just looking to cover some of those costs but really something i'd love to do and i'd love to give back to our community so probate court networking again the tickets it's on july 6th at 2 p.m pacific time and it's free if you use pro mic promo code probate equally with no space second you guys might be interested in is agents helping agents which is a group i have of real estate agents we're hosting a tony robbins coach who's going to help us motivation-wise i think one of the things i know in these markets when there's transitions we're a little frustrated we all get disappointed deals fall out we get new deals it's time to ramp up your motivation your mindset so we have a tony robbins coach coming in this is free as well it's an online event on wednesday at 12 noon same day so that is free if you click on it's in the chat box if you don't have access to the chat box you can text robin's robb i'm sorry outstanding o-u-t-s-t-a-n-d-g outstanding wt s-t-i-n-i-n-d stan l-u-t s-t-a-n-d-i-n-g to the phone number [phone number shown on screen]-213-4602-5777 southern networking event if you're california we have on tomorrow agents helping agents we're hosting our monthly event in diamondbar at the holiday inn we get about 50 agents together and talk about both motivation and tactical things we do it networking wise hopefully we can share some leads together and do some business together so all those are available to you most that's free

4:06 Usually we do events free for real estate agents because we don't have extra money but more importantly we need to be saving our cash as a transition period and investing money into things are going to generate business for us so love to see you there now i'm really excited to add in to our call today i'm gonna put in the spotlight if you've been on my calls regularly two things you may have seen me interview them already a couple times because the first time i found this program i jumped all over it i knew it was a great tool for my customers for people who didn't have money maybe they could do it mostly on their own but they just couldn't do it on their own and yet they needed some professional service also i just like him he's a fun guy to talk to but also some exciting news but i've had him on and also i'm sure i mentioned ez-probate.com every single call i do on this call on tuesday because i really believe in the product i'm not an affiliate i don't get a penny i just get the joy of talking to Byron bytress Byron welcome back to our probate weekly thanks bill great to be here excited to talk to everybody and yeah all things probate is it's fun to have somebody else who probably talks more about probate or as much as about probate as i do so in the background there's a nice ocean looks like or like where you were no yeah so i'm an amateur photographer so that's one of my pictures it's a terrible business i think i've made twelve hundred dollars selling pictures and i have like five thousand dollars in gear so it is fun so i'm in vermont and that's lake champlain now that you see very nice very nice like champlain in vermont so just and just for just to lay it out there it's kind of the elephant in the room easy hyphen probate we actually scheduled a few months ago we delayed it for some exciting news again those you've been on my college regularly know that i regularly i've interviewed trustandwill.com as a low-cost but cost-effective tool for estate planning and i regularly mention it to people as a prospecting tool talk to your clients talk about

6:08 Estate planning but what's fascinating one day i talked to Byron who tells me that they were merging or being acquired and so Byron give us the update what's the relationship now and i don't have any money with either company investing the company but i'm just excited to hear you guys working together to what's the relationship between trustandwill.com and ez-probate.com sure yeah so as of may we have been officially acquired been acquired by Trust & Will and so soon the EZ-Probate brand name if you will kind of like kind of disappear and what we do will be fully integrated under trustandwill.com for the time being probably at least through the end of the year EZ-Probate proper as a website as a as a name will likely linger but between now and then it'll kind of shift over and so really when you think about both pre-death which is creating the document will and trust the trust and will and post death that's kind of where this unification really comes in and it really does complete the entire cycle fun fact today was the first time that we EZ-Probate actually probated an estate from a document created by trust and will so that's really is the kind of the full cycle ideally everybody avoids probate but if anybody has been here long enough or does probate enough to know even the best estate plan there's always something gets left out of the trust something gets left it doesn't get titled or things get signed but then never implemented and so it's i wouldn't say it's impossible but it's very common to have probate even if you have a well-executed estate plan i'm a bit older than you but remember the comedy routine on saturday night live roseanne rosanna danna it was always it's always something right and that's and it's real estate and that's probate it's always something it was not the inventory prayer support just to this form it's not that form

8:10 It's the other form so yeah that is definitely the nature of the business but it's exciting that going together and i'll just share with you know a cute story is i had come across trustandwill.com just in my research referred them a couple customers to them who had good experience but i felt like i found some small you know unknown entity my son-in-law goes to work for a significant wealth management firm and they actually have a relationship like a company relationship where they all their wealth advisors i want to say they're 50 or 100 when they refer that's the one they're approved to refer to because they feel they get consistent good service for their clients and they're not in an affiliate program either they're just a discount to their client type program so it's a great company very well thought of have a great reputation and when i heard that you were connecting with them i was really happy for you and proud to say i knew you when you were just a struggling tech company i guess in some regards so let's go back to the beginning what is easy hyphen probate.com soon to be merging to trust and will but let's talk about the nature of the product what's the service that you offer the marketplace yeah sure so again just quick definition so probate is the legal process of transferring assets after someone passes away and every person that passes away with assets in their single name that doesn't automatically transfer to somebody else those assets will have to go through probate and so what we do is we provide a tech solution for probate again if you know about probit you know that this is paper-based it's court-based it's kind of a struggle we're here to make it easy right hence the EZ-Probate and then the soon to be trusted will probate and the name indicates that our job our goal our mission is to make it both accessible but more importantly make it easier so think of us like turbo tax for probate you answer our easy questionnaire it takes about 20 minutes it's the who the what the where the how much and then from that we're able to instantly produce all the forms that are needed to file for probate and give users a step-by-step

10:13 Instructions so either they can do it on their own or we also provide this is really key especially for realtors we provide an affordable flat fee attorney because i think for those in the call here the whole goal for probate for you is to get to the closing quickly and anybody who's ever done probate will know that it is typically takes forever it can be months before your evening hearing is is even considered and before you know it's like months if not years before you can actually sell the real estate with our system as soon as you're done the questionnaire as soon as you pay you get the forms instantly i mean if you use our attorney plan we will actually have an attorney representation again this is a flat fee if you know probate in california i'm assuming this is where a lot of people are it's a percent of the assets which is an enormous expense for people oftentimes making it very un attainable our diy plan is six hundred dollars that's near and dear to my heart and that fulfills our mission which is essentially making it accessible for folks there's a pretty famous study by the federal reserve pre-covered about 40 of the u.s population didn't have 400 to pay for any unexpected expense and so how are people going to be able to pay the traditional 35 to 5 000 retainer fee not the total fee retainer fee of a traditional attorney it just it becomes really hard yeah and i think i always on one hand it's inexpensive right so during yourself six hundred dollars concierge plan which my experience is there's a person there they can call they walk you through the steps and as long as you don't need an attorney they pretty much will help an average person get through the whole process at 17.50 but more than that in my mind is the quality of the service is better than the average attorney now i know great attorneys that refer business to but 90

12:17 Of probates in l.a county for example are done by an attorney who's done one or less in the last 12 months how many approximately how many probates have you guys done see in l.a county in the last year yeah so we this is something i'm famous for saying we have done more probit cases than anybody in the history of mankind because no one has ever done it at scale now mind you technically don't do the probit case we provide either a diy do-it-yourself service or obviously we're looping in an attorney but our software has done it and so we've done work we've done about 3500 cases total since 2018. and last year we did about 2000 in that so obviously ramping up needless to say covid was a unique circumstance for all of us you know we joke we help the dead that was a very obviously that's not really necessarily meant to be like a funny joke but just how we talk about ourselves sometimes covet really accelerated this notion of an online service for probate and so and la county is our number one county period we i'm guessing we must have done 700 ellie count in l.a county last year fantastic well you had two things one you had people passing and then second you had the court closing which even the best attorneys struggled with the change in procedures and they were changing regularly and but they had to accommodate online and so that just it's like you guys were built for that experience yeah for sure no actually one of my proudest moments you know for obviously the court shut down in 2020 as the world than the country did one of the things i'm really proud of is we had a case where there was a foreclosure like it was happening this is right before the moratorium was going to be issued as the courts were closed we figured out how to do an ex parte no hearing special administration and we got letters within one day wow and so

14:21 That's a it's a unique thing that we've kind of stumbled upon both probate but also foreclosure mitigation for those in the room obviously virtually i would encourage all to really think about that as a business line item because there are a lot of reverse mortgages out there when people die and families don't know what they're doing they start to scramble very often really late and we're get we get looped in at the very end and we're sometimes it's hard we just had a case where we did an ex parte petition again for closure it was supposed to be the 30th but because we were able to file quickly get an attorney involved quickly we've been able to extend that so again no guarantees but again the speed is something that we offer and it's not sacrificed with any errors because there's no human involved in if you will the spelling the transposing of the data from nobody's handwriting a form giving it to an assistant and the assistant then trying to type it up our system is you type up the questionnaire the user does and then we instantly transpose that onto the correct forms so in my way and i feel like i've used this service you have used you as a tool three different ways number one sme talks to families who are in probate or i talk to investors wholesalers who find families who are in probate i refer them to your service when i think they're capable of using your either diy program or concierge there's a reason to spend an extra five thousand ten thousand fifteen thousand dollars or more they're not gonna they don't have the money and they don't wanna spend it and that's the most common uk use case so i guess what percentage of business comes to you from direct consumers i know you guys do advertising online and such is that the bulk your business or do you also work with professionals or for your cases yeah i would say it's probably like 85 90 is direct to consumer and it's a growing and ever-expanding

16:24 Professional realtors are our number one referral source one of the things that we're able to do is we have such an insight to the case so we actually oftentimes will especially if a realism this is actually something that we only do with realtors if a realtor is involved we will offer a zero down a probate option now granted there will be some expenses that have to be spent the filing fee we're not going to front that money in the newspaper announcement but we can do everything zero down and be paid at closing our requirement is typically as long as there's a realtor involved that we connect i get and that the client essentially sign your not the purchase and sale agreement but listing agreement the listen agreement yeah that's our requirement we just we're here to help you and your client and very often they can't do it without selling the house and we've also run into situations where hey you can't sell the house unless you know the there's always oftentimes there's a family member who lives with mom or dad that has no money has no job and you can't sell the house until they move out they can't move out until you sell the house you're caught in this and so we've actually worked with a lot of the lending institutions for probate but we're really trying to make our job is to make this faster and so if you know anything about lending inheritance loans they can be very expensive almost 100 interest in the deals that we've done it's been way less because we've been able to close that loop so fast right we get letters typically within 30 to 45 days very much court dependent on the speed and then we're working with the realtor kind of in parallel so that the day that we have the letters hopefully is the day you close or at least really close and that's one of our system that's probably one of our secret sauce is we loop in the professional so that you know when the hearing is what to do what's not to

18:27 Instantly after the hearing is over you're going to be notified success here's the minute order right so as soon as you get the minute order you can take that to escrow and be like let's get a closing date and then in an ideal world you're talking days from letters to closing and the whole thing could be done hopefully in 45 days so that's something that i think we're really happy about and proud that we can close that loop because again families are at need great for your business to get a sale sooner as opposed to i'm guessing you know nine months ten months in a in a traditional sense on average two years in l.a county i mean if i just pull the spread the whole spreadsheet out wow so yeah and so you know from the day i met you i keep asking why aren't they all done like this and the answer is we all find our own path and customers find somebody they're comfortable with and they you know they the attorney tells them they can handle it but and some can look there's great attorneys only but there are a lot that aren't and that's the challenge of this is understand your limits okay so framing the call here it's meant to be interactive we have everybody on mute because we've been zoom bomb of late so you have to request to be muted either raise your hand in the zoom application or the chat box type of question if you're watching on the live stream on youtube or facebook as well you can type a question and if you start with the letter q i'll know it's a question makes it easier for me to pick up and we'll get back to it we did get a couple questions by when somebody just loved your description of the case where you had the ex the one day ex parte and you said it's the outlier but you thought it'd be helpful to kind of understand the principles can you kind of walk through again obviously can't get into the details of the customer i guess it's probably public record what was why is it i think you mentioned foreclosure why is it what's the ex parte look like and then what do you guys do yeah sure let's first let's describe the normal process and then we will describe kind of like where the ex parte what does that mean all that stuff so again the normal process is you petition the court to get the authority to manage the estate right you have huge

20:31 Variability amongst courts right now i will single out the worst courts in my opinion you have sacramento county you have some you have solano county and then contra costa why are they the worst top three that's good to hear yeah why are they the worst is they take three to six months to just even process anything right and so that is where probate gets so frustrating for people is how long it can take the court right then you start adding any other delays ahead of that it takes forever so outside of those courts typically you get a hearing 30 to 45 days after your petition that gives everybody plenty of time to do the proper notices right before the hearing you have to have notices to the errors and the public notice the ad in the paper typically 15 days before the hearing so that's the normal cycle so ex parte although some people call it ex party i study latin so ex parte i think is the way is the correct one expert day simply means one party and you're basically saying the court hey court there is a special circumstance where i need you to consider this right now and i need temporary limited authority so in california if you can bypass the notice which is required by law so it's not like it's not like you're not ever going to do it you're saying i need it yesterday please and then we'll do the proper channel first so really the expert tape petition is a two-part petition where you tell the court the emergency typically foreclosure right that's with real estate that's going to be the emergency other reasons could be the property's in danger you know maybe somebody's living in it then they need to be removed because it's a whatever as long as you can articulate a reasonable cause to have

22:34 An emergency hearing and that's what an expert a petition really is it's emergency hearing the court will consider it and so the nature of the hearing is that it's same day again there's local rules so you have to potentially asterix some counties really suck i mentioned a couple of them you really have to pound them to like even get these emergency petitions in front of the judge as well so then the judge will give an emergency limited authority i mean typically you're asking the court within that limited scope just to gather assets right open about block account where the executive administrator won't be able to write checks unless approved and ability to sell the house without any further instructions from the court typically without the notice of proposed action or the hearing that is often with limited authority so that's generally how it works and it's it's it's a it's a special situation again and you have to clarify that and typically you have to prove it you can't just say hey there's an emergency trust me you have to show the foreclosure notice that it's going to happen typically there's a trustee sale already and so forth and so then once you have your special authority it's typically limited again you're only you're going to be very limited what you can do and it does expire and so you either file right alongside it the normal full authority which then the hearing will be x number of weeks to months into the future the normal cycle and then as your authority is then ending your other authority is then beginning and in that case it was a customer paying for the attorney plans was that all that for five thousand dollars yeah and we'd highly recommend the attorney plan in those situations why is that again without getting into the huge concept of the unauthorized practice of law the ex parte petition is not a standard petition you just download so it does require a little bit of

24:39 Judgment and insight something that we try to do very quickly again we as you can tell we operate very fast with these petitions we move them top of the list i get involved personally and i kind of go through all the all the stuff and we do it for that same flat fee and often this relationship right the attorney you're picking you've used for other cases they've done business in that area an individual on their own just is not going to have the relationship with the judge and the judge is going to be hesitant to do any individual five thousand dollars that price is absolutely amazing next question i love this i love asking this question is this the other reason why i got involved with you do you the answer is yes provide services nationwide yeah we provide in every state there's a handful of states that require an attorney by law and so we may not be able to do every proceeding and so at minimum we're able to do what's called the smallest date or the simplified proceedings in every state the five states that require an attorney by law are texas florida mississippi missouri and iowa we are live texas and florida we have attorney partners there and we're looking to expand our attorney partners in the other states they're just a little bit smaller they haven't really hate to say it hasn't been an economic reason it's an important reason social reasons for us to want to do it but trump you know we haven't yet to have an attorney in some of those smaller states and then there are quirky counties like cook county illinois if you don't have an attorney they're they're going to deny you and so we have had attorney partners for illinois because it's an important state again the five states are texas florida iowa missouri and mississippi correct where you need an attorney so you have to use the attorney plan on your program in the states yeah again there are always exceptions generally speaking if you qualify for those simplified procedures so for example florida has a summary administration our experience even though there's no technical law that says you don't need an attorney in those situations in our experience

26:43 Judges with like 99 percent of the time will accept the petition without an attorney okay same with texas if it's a it's called mutamen of title which is essentially summer administration so there are sometimes there are these exceptions even if the state requires an attorney by law and the other ones you just don't have attorneys at this point iowa missouri mississippi but you were able to do some things just none of the things yeah and actually one of the going back to with our partnership with trust and will is they also offer attorney plans with their wheels and trusts they have a bank of attorneys that we are now expanding so hopefully within weeks to maybe two months we should be expanding into like 12 or more states got it got it wow okay great i see al's hand up but i'll turn off his camera mike if you're there al be glad to put you back on if you knew yourself one way for that wendy asks does 45 days include court proceedings yeah so generally speaking the 45 days is the court proceeding so like when you file that you're going to get a hearing date generally speaking that's 30 to 45 days from the date that you file so that is the hearing date and mind you the hearing can be very whatever i'm looking for very functional it's like yeah because i'll give you a really good example in san diego if you ever listen to probate core anybody first of all anybody can log in and listen to probate court it's kind of interesting sometimes you get some fun juicy cases but most of the time it's like the judge is like the following cases are pre-approved and they just rattle them off or they're posted as a pre-approval if that's the case then typically no one even needs to show up right they just go right through them it's only if there's a question or sometimes if a judge routinely does that so the hearing is typically 30 to 45 days that is the proceeding and that's when the judge will approve the petition

28:45 Sign the order and then the only thing that really is physical still in california is you do have to physically print the letters of authority sign it mail it to court and have it mailed back to you sadly that's usually like the anti-climactic moment where you're just not waiting for the mail often yeah al i see you back on there what's going on big al from ventura well i have a semi-long question i don't know if i should call [Music] the property representing the escrow this is the escrow the buyer put their deposit in and the seller hello yeah you got a bad connection wait turn off the video and we'll go audio all the way down when you try the video we'll do audio on me all right is that badly yes pulled over i was driving okay i've got this house in escrow the Byron seller signed the contract the buyer signs the escrow instructions put her money in i go out to the seller's house to get the escrow instruction sign and she's had a heart attack the mom and the daughter refused to go forward she dies the title company says we can't give the deposit back until five years it goes to unclaimed property so i lent them years before that 200 bucks and i have a signed receipt and it's in the contract they're paying me back the 200 bucks so they could go bankrupt to stop a foreclosure so i'm a creditor and i spoke to your company once and i look on the foreclosure computer yesterday and they're in foreclosure now they were telling me i should do the five thousand dollar program and then i gotta publish and i gotta do this other

30:48 Stuff but you mentioned something about you have something for realtors or you have a quick ex party is there a way you guys could help me well i guess yeah i'm trying to unpack that so if you're a creditor well let me ask you this are you this is probably best we maybe have a one-on-one yeah the errors the heirs refuse to touch it and they just let it want to let it go back to the bank so let's you know this might be helpful for everybody is there is a like a priority of who can be the executive administrator and literally the last person of priority in california can be anybody else that's the actual statute the last person of priority can be anybody else so we've had situations where either like the financial advisor the accountant or oftentimes realtor petitions the court to be the administrator so let's definitely check because i think there's there's opportunity here for us to help you if it is in foreclosure depending how far away the foreclosure is the more likelihood there's still time to do stuff so al if you could talk to bill and have bill we'll we'll share my direct contact then why don't we chat yeah great yeah i could use some help before it goes back to the bank but i think also another point about what you're saying is there are other people who can file probate besides errors such as creditors for example so it's not uncommon the creditors will follow probate because they can't find any years and now the blue and error pops up the creditor says fine go ahead and take control just we want to get paid and they begin the process so we also have a network of professional fiduciaries so if you don't want to because one of the things that is important for you guys is selling real estate if you if you're the executive administrator you may have a conflict to also then be their listing agent or

32:52 Even receive any compensation for that so you can loop in a professional fiduciary and so we actually have a network of that as well i didn't know that that's yeah i was looking for one literally monday and tuesday so oh yeah that's nothing next time i'll call you i struggle for a couple days i missed the opportunity actually to try and find somebody else so that's the way it goes okay matt asked a question i'm not quite sure i understand it matt i may need you to come in here and explain a little bit your question is let's see how many times do you use expert for homes before it becomes a maintenance issue abandoned homes really are hard sales i often have to auction them so it's interesting so madd is not is actually an auctioneer i think by trade or business but the truth is you know i'll just tell a quick story and then and then buy and i'll ask you what your involvement is on the on the status of the property i had a property once where there were no pictures it wasn't listed in the mls it was a court confirmation sale this requires listing mls and wasn't the mls so i called the listing agent and said well what's the deal why is it listed he said we'll call the attorney which i love i called the attorney and the attorney said well the agent told me that the property in such bad condition you could not put it in the mls so that's not true i probably have three listings worse than that one so i would say it's not uncommon in probate properties we sell property this in very bad condition which i try to get it cleaned out and that means junked out and you know dangerous things removed and then cleaned up some molly maids in but by the way when you guys get a case and it's a now state family member the property might be in really bad condition it might be dangerous to go in it might be squatters or something how do you guys handle those cases with those properties sure so for us the process is virtually the same the only thing i'll note is often pretty much universally when there's an out of state executive administrator there will be the minimum bond required and so that's just one procedural thing that you will have to do there's there's

34:54 There's no way to waive that bond it's it's required so we'll just have to get the bond and so the best way to think about abandon or really state in general right so regardless of the condition is if you can get everybody's agreement and there's no contest you get full authority you are not going to be subject to the petition to sell property and then the potential having somebody else outbid you right because even if you have a signed contract you have limited authority there's a chance that somebody can come in and say i'll offer a dollar more or whatever and i'll bid you so with full authority which is why we do recommend very often with real estate if you're going to sell to consider our attorney plan even though there's no attorney requirement in california we have seen too often where the judge will say i give you limited authority simply because you don't have an attorney i wish it wasn't true but so that's one thing to note again which is circling back why we want to work with realtors more and again if you're involved we can do a zero down so then the whole thing is paid at closing so that's the one thing to really consider so i guess looking back i think was matt with this question abandoned homes yeah they're really hard to sell even more reason you want full authority you don't want the court involved approve your sale because then you can just do a investor deal you can just sell it for whatever you guys agreed that is the right price the executive administrator does have a duty a financial duty to do you know their best to do an arms length transaction and obviously they get to maximize the value and you do get to consider the potential condition slash how much work money is will be needed to get the house up to par and that's a factor in the rationale as to why you might sell it for quote unquote under market price yeah and the reason why i asked that is because here in north carolina we'll

36:57 Have probates that aren't filed for 10 years and then all of a sudden they are and the house is falling apart by that time because there's no been nobody maintaining the home so i was that my main question was do you are you allowed to go in there and file for the limited authority before it actually hits probate or are you taking that on yourself and then saying look we just have this so there's no confusion the limited authority is probate right so think of think of any authority to manage the estate as probate and so the limited authority typically is designed for special circumstances the main ones are protection of the value of the house and very often if there's minor children involved where somebody has to then either supervise them and or get access to the bank account to feed them clothe them you know so those are the main two kind of like standards for why you might have special authority and i was yeah so generally speaking you definitely need probate first and you don't have to wait 10 years or whatever anybody really can potentially file the only thing i will caution anybody here is you really do have to know who the family is because you are required by law to notify them and so that's probably the one limiting factor anybody any random stranger wanting to be the executive administrator you're going to have to do your research as to who is who in the family to notify them exactly but if you do the reasonable effort and can't find a definitely family members you can move forward as long as you document to the court satisfaction you made those efforts and they can move forward with whatever has to be done with the property so yeah just a clarification typically that you document those efforts if you know who the family member is you just can't locate them

39:02 That's very different than just not knowing who is the family right so very often we've seen the court require genealogy reports again if you're not family member if you can't test who it is again that's a little bit more nuanced and state by state county by account the kind of kind of rules got it a question from gunner governor how can we help you yeah it's it's actually can you hear me okay perfect it's not really a question i just wanted to sort of a little bit of a caution i was just on there like an hour phone call with the pr got off the phone properties in gardena california and she had full authority obviously she can sell at any time when she wants to her attorney will not give in and will not will not let her sell without having the court referee come up so she's been waiting this poor lady for almost five weeks to get the referee to come out and during that time they had squatters come in the house and now we have we're trying to do an eviction we just started that that's eight months later it's in l.a so when the attorney's this is actually it's a it's not an attorney it's one of one of those elder care law facilities this probably is an attorney but more than likely not familiar with the probate process obviously yeah because you alluded to it's not required to have the referee do it first we do it all the time in fact on the internet there's a little check box it's like did you sell it before the inventory can happen and so yeah i feel for you that's that's that's pretty horrible yeah and they can always supplement you know before the hearing whether it be for court confirmation sale or authority hearing you can always get the proper referee is really for those who don't know is really a an appraiser the court designates some probate referees a different term in california they're publicly known you can look up and find their name and their address the phone number not to harass them but in a business-like manner to expedite the

41:05 Case generally i find them pretty good but occasionally one or two gets way behind and i have one right now we had a 2.2 million dollar escrow that i might both ends on and the guy just could not get out to clarify something and we gave him four weeks and he's looking for another four weeks they only do a drive-by one of the problems with them is sometimes they come in a little too high because they only drive by they don't know how bad it might be inside probates tend to be pretty beaten up on the inside but i find if i show them pictures and such they'll change that now i've spoken to i used to be an appraiser in late i know a bunch of them and vast majority they don't even get in the car they just do a google drive so it might be the two three-year-old pictures of the house even right but they're actually looking at it's it's funny california they have like a an invoice like for their fee and then they can charge i forget how much for the photos and they would charge like you know from days back when you know Byron's amateur photographer but you know there are days where people would charge for photos five bucks a picture or something they would charge like 35 dollars for some photos really drop by with your phone and you could paste them in the report yeah anyway so that was just a little caution if you get into that and this lady i mean i obviously can convince her i actually sent her copies of the california probate code the pertinent areas just to show her so she can the other thing i've done this case gunner is i've pulled you know i subscribe different data sources and i'll pull and say all the cases that that attorney's done in the last year now they might have done 10 or 12 or 15 okay then you know give them some credit but typically i find these attorneys who are very positioned on these things they're very defensive very scared they haven't done but one a year or one every two years next and i'll call the train tell them listen i've been in court i've seen it done this way so i don't know if i could help you at all with that but be glad too if i can and Byron how you know how many cases have you guys done in the county again 3 500 you said yeah well that's totally i mean l.a county is almost like half of

43:08 Our business i mean it's it's a lot so yeah hundreds and ellie county actually is a model to me for how probate should work is easy court call is i mean everything from a technology perspective i would say it's top notch obviously there's a lot of judges a lot of cases so you can easily get lost in the shuffle if you're on top of it but i just love how easy it is to follow a case show people where things are you can download documents it's it's amazing from that perspective yeah i worked four counties here in southern california and l.a as you say they're by far the best ones even their website is lightning fast compared with the other with orange county and riverside san bernardino anyway thank you thanks thank you so much we've got another question from christopher i think i know who this is just cut by the special authority allows the administrator to sell without the notice of proposed action you know and so for those who don't know well in california and mostly as Byron said a limited or full authority full authority would be the administrator can do most what they want to on their own limit authority means most major things have to be approved like the sale has to be approved by the court expenses have to be approved by the court but even with full authority to sell to sell the property normally you would need a notice of proposed action and many times attorneys will say to me oh it's not required by law which is true but the title companies will require it in order to change title there's an exception which is the attorneys will send out notices of the parties who would who would need the 15 days notice and they'll sign waivers of the notice and that way it can happen more quickly so Byron do you guys prepare would you do waivers to expedite to avoid the notice of possession yeah no for sure and i think also the question was related about i mean you can always as long as the judge has ordered it obviously then you can do it you can point to the title because in our special administration packet we typically ask the judge for

45:11 Permission to sell without notice of proposed action without notice because again you're trying if you don't do this quickly you're going to lose the house and there is no asset anymore so that's typically how that would work obviously in special circumstance in the normal authority no emergency yeah we would either do the notice proposed action and or prepare all the waivers in the packet as well that's fine because that's what does if you do that okay so upcoming items somebody asks for put that in the chat box and let's see i miss a lot of questions i guess we've been talking for a while here and this thing's going by wasn't paying attention sorry guys wow okay how many just for you let's see the link okay so i put back in the link to the upcoming events back into the chat box you have that again kim asked you for business out to agents brokers kim he sends all referrals to me that's what i'm having on the call today no it's not true but so do you refer business out to agents you get agents who bring you business i think i know the answer that one but go ahead Byron how do you handle it yeah obviously we want to be as open and receptive as we can we don't have a fixed list that we refer out to one of the things that i'll be perfectly honest with you that we are going to be building is kind of like a marketplace and in our position we have a unique very unique advantage in that we know before anybody that obviously there's somebody going to be filing the petition because they're doing it on our website and if they're going to be selling real estate so in the not too distant future we're hoping to basically be rolling out like a marketplace of like these are going to be pending sales that need a realtor so how we do that that's really going to be devil in the details obviously unrealistic to be able to have a thousand referral partners and feed them all but something that we're going to be rolling out so to be determined but yes we do work with realtors

47:15 Reach out to me if you want to be on the list and happy to kind of kind of work that out to something great mikey has a great question also do you do fee waivers for your eligible clients so just to explain in l.a county the fee to file probate separate from the EZ-Probate fees or the attorneys fees or the fees the county charges or third party expenses so you have the filing for the county for the former i think it's 374 or 354 or something and then you have the publication fee which could be another 300 the la county will often waive the fee there's a form that the customer fills out saying there's a hardship and then they either approve or don't approve it do you guy Byron do you guys yeah absolutely yeah that's really core to our business if i didn't mention this all of our plans have a payment plan so the lowest that we do unless of course we do the zero down our diy we do a hundred and twenty dollars a month so people can get part started with probate for a hundred and twenty dollars and so whenever someone does a payment plan we'll ask them hey do you need any more assistance in getting the court fee waiver because obviously they don't have 600 for us they're not going to have the 450 year filing fee plus the newspaper the newspaper is the only thing that like you have to do so they got a big borrow and steal but at the minimum we can make it so you can get started with and then just have to do the newspaper announcement and i mean as a professional i offered a payphob a special credit card for advancing money for families and so it's fyi buyer if you have a client who needs the publication done or the 120 i offer that for them as a service kevin asked a question i think this goes back to the prior question he had tenant pass away who owes the money and he passed away he can't find anything about whether a probate was done or not how would you find out so i can say kevin you know we can search the person see if you own any property you can search multiple states now as far as money there's there are services that will

49:18 Research people and see if they have bank accounts life insurance policies and such that cost some cash up front me or may not be worth it for you but for real estate for sure you can find out check most counties find out if they're if the name pops up and then if so you can do a probate and once you get the probate rolling you can even advance yourself against some of that money to find out about the rest aren't any other insights as far as research actually there's a great resource that we always recommend every state has a public notice.com kind of website so if you just google x date so let's just google california public notice there's a californiapublicnotus.com and then you can just search for the name and filter for probate so the only limitation here is there are some states that do not require a public notice namely new york so that won't work in the that state but 90 of the time in most states you have to do a public notice so if there's a hearing if there's a probate case happening outside of the smallest affidavit which means there's no court process it will be listed in the publicnotus.com so that would be a great resource it's free and as soon as the paper hits it's on that as well question are you affiliated with probatejunkies.com probate junkies i know of who did that but i don't think they're still around i don't see i've looked at that service and i don't think that's still doing what that used to do is that like a helping people clear out stuff no more about more about getting data of upcoming probate sales and i gotcha yeah but i don't think i don't think you're involved with that at all yeah okay jasmine realtor investor looking into connect new york very good justin nice to have you okay kevin censor's fine will your stuff cover bankruptcy for your clients that's interesting well no but actually as a legal tech entrepreneur there is a

51:21 Ever expanding legal tech and there is a service for bankruptcies and so there is it's called unbound or it'll come to me in a second but they are the EZ-Probate of bankruptcy so they offer free bankruptcy services and then depending on the situation there may be attorney referrals as well so if i you know what here let's just look at it because i'll google it right now because it'll bother me so online bank of course someone had to tell my wife don't pay attention to my search history Upsolve so here i'm gonna i'm gonna put the link in the chat here so Upsolve is a wonderful organization and they help people file bankruptcy on their own without an attorney there's even an al all this without attorney stuff is burgeoning there's immigration without return there's all these companies doing it the one thing that's really interesting about them i'll just put a plug is again i mentioned the unauthorized practice of law they came out with flying fists they proactively sued the new york attorney general for infringement of free speech because as you can imagine attorneys don't want people like us to exist and we've actually had two what i call them bar fights two inquiries about the unauthorized practice of law and you know without saying we won we're still here and our business practice is not altered materially so but it's an amazing organization and i would highly recommend anybody to read about this because this is a really constitutional right in my opinion the right to represent yourself i mentioned those states that required by law i'd love to change that because that's in my opinion unconstitutional it does affect obviously some certain demographics largely minorities and people of low income

53:23 I'm hispanic i was born in guatemala so anybody who is not kind of your pro typical either wealthy person or white can have a hard time oftentimes in court and we see that all the time so i would encourage all of you to really look at the organizations involved to push some of these things forward because i think the legal issues in the world that we have is oftentimes the power struggle and there's a lot of hopefully that wasn't a big soapbox but i love these guys they punched new york right in the face and i just think that's awesome you know i'm not a person of color but i see too often attorneys from different minority groups not serving their community and i think organization companies like yours you're not a non-profit you're not you know at least you don't tend to be a non-profit but i think serve the customer so much better than the system does now even with people who make their life's habit to help underserved populations offering it expensively you know literally you know i would be glad to advance funds you're glad to advance funds they can literally do it for free and save money and keep that money within the family structure for their wealth or legacy wealth mikey asks is he based in lake county no he's been he's in vermont is your company basically vermont as well and then post merger now what does that mean what are you guys gonna do yeah so trust in will is a san diego company so whoo lucky you we're california if you will a company but we have employees in 20 states again trust and will does we have attorney partners in many states our california our main california attorney partner is also in san diego as well and one of the things that we how do we make this so efficient is hey we're online and we one of the one of the limitations i didn't express is some states still require physical appearance which is so terrible one of the reasons we're able to make it so inexpensive is our attorneys appear remotely and so that reduces the need so one person

55:26 Can really handle one attorney and his staff and his other attorneys under him is able to handle all the volume that we produce in california which is why we're able to make it affordable and we've even found a couple services that that have what's called appearance attorneys where somebody will just literally an attorney will just show up on behalf of another attorney and for whatever reason that's allowed but you can't zoom in so the whole thing is kind of silly at times when it comes to the court process the parents trainers are really interesting in la because they'll be that's all they do they get 175 per appearance might have four or five a day and they have different courts at the same time and one they went for early one they went late they're running around and the online service is so much more efficient but better than either is getting your paperwork done ahead of time and being what's called referred for approval where there's no real hearing that's actually the best patricia castillo asks do you work with special needs pro pooled trusts where there's no real estate assets only 401k funds to be dispersed to beneficiary that's receiving social security and medicare and that's a very specialized yeah that's based on the planning side if i didn't mention this earlier i'm a certified financial planner so the shorter answer is yes however by definition special needs trust does require legal advice i will be the first to agree with a lot of that and so what we would actually do is connect you when we do our estate planning and we find out that the situation does require a little bit more advanced help we will then refer and do those things and so the short answer is i'm an expert in it but we will have to loop in an attorney for sure knock out a couple of questions real fast for we're going to wrap up will you work with properties or only limited authority meaning if the i guess petitioners out of state you know it's gonna be limit for going in you guys do those required confirmation don't you oh sure yeah i mean actually if anything we'll fight to get full authority like i mentioned earlier sometimes you'll just get a judge as like we petitioned for full authority everybody agreed to full authority and the judge is like well screw you

57:28 Don't have an attorney limited authority right so then we will like basically kind of repetition and be like no full authority so we can either do that and or if it is limited authority it's not the end of the world it is a hassle so we do try to undo it and we can even then loop in the attorney add the attorney to it to get full authority so yes the short answer is absolutely we can help with limit authority still so there are a bunch of agents who asked to be the referral partner for you in various states what i will say is you know i'm looking to build a national network as well i have this group i have the probate experts group in facebook there's also a product executorium that i had on here before which is like a rolodex of people in this space as well so i encourage you to join those and i you know i would make my best case with Byron to be a resource to help them as well and you can reach out to them as well i think just to wrap up here because we're coming up on top of the hour i want to thank you for your time Byron boxers founder of ez-probate.com so today if you were going to go there it's easy hyphen probate.com but they are acquired by and will be merged into trustandwool.com i've had them on my show previously they're a estate planning service similar to his or online cost effective yet and do a really good job not for everybody certainly not for specialized detailed cases that need expert legal services but for the do-it-yourselfer or people who need basic services at a very reasonable price Byron it's always a pleasure to have you on the call i really appreciate you so much your support appreciate your service and what you guys do i wish you the best of luck in your new format we'll continue working together awesome and thank you bill and the big plug bill's a great person and he's definitely one of the people that is top of mind whenever we have a realtor that we need referral and very often his network of realtors that he knows and across the state is so it's a useful resource for us so i

59:32 Encourage all of you to really reach out to bill in his program because he's just wonderful so thank you guys have a great night it's eight o'clock my time and i hope to be here again thank you and then the rest of you a couple housekeeping items tomorrow in diamond bars or agents helping agents event at the holiday inn that's for us tomorrow at 9 00 a.m in the next week we have our perfecting your listing presentation pomona it's tuesdays at 10 that's the weekly program next thursday we have a brew real estate for real estate agents beer on la brea have you south of wilshire that's free all this is in the upcoming events document here in the chat box or if you text upcoming to [phone number shown on screen] again [phone number shown on screen] next week a couple special events on tuesday on tuesday we have tony that's actually wrong it's wednesday we have robin's event it's actually july 6th at noon we have tony robbins organization is going to do motivational for our agents helping agents and then on july 6 wednesday at 2 p.m i'm doing a segment on probate court networking i'm going to describe how i built my business by going to court daily and these are just basic fundamentals that i've put together that you can use to build your business as well given the court in la's opening up but other courts around the country are opening up as well hopefully you'll find them helpful so again check out the upcoming events we do this public weekly every thursday 4 p.m pacific 7 pm eastern i'm bill gross the la probate expert thank you guys so much for being on the call really appreciate your support make it