Selling Mom's Baguio Home From Across the Pacific

Some deals start with a listing. This one started with a message on our website from a family living in the United States, and a story that was a lot heavier than the usual "we'd like to sell our house."

A visit that changed everything

Every year, their mother would fly to the US to spend time with her children. It was a routine the whole family looked forward to. But during one of those visits, she suffered a mild stroke. Doctors don't allow stroke patients to fly, so the trip home to Baguio that she kept asking for simply couldn't happen. One of her daughters took her in and cared for her, and over the following months it became clear that Mom's health wasn't going to let her come back.

Back in Baguio stood the house she had called home for decades, the same house her children grew up in before they built their own lives abroad. She had always pictured keeping it forever. Now, together with her children, she made the hard decision to let it go.

A house with history, and a lot of potential

When we went to see the property, we found a home built around the 1980s, still filled with the furniture and belongings of a whole lifetime, much of it big, heavy and old. This was not a house that had been prepared for a sale. But it had something that matters more than fresh paint, and that's location. It sits close to the city, within walking distance of some of Baguio's most popular schools and universities, which is exactly what many buyers here are looking for.

We started marketing, watched how the market responded, and worked with the family to settle on a price that would get them the most out of the sale. Several offers came in, and the family chose a bank-financed offer that they were genuinely happy with compared to the rest.

That was the good news. Then came the parts nobody had planned for.

Fixing paperwork that was never meant for a sale

Because Mom always meant to keep the house, a lot of the paperwork had been left untouched for years. The property did have its original title, and enough time had passed since it was awarded for it to be legally sold. The problem was the tax declaration. The one on file was still the old version from before the land was titled, and it had never been updated to carry the title number. For a sale to go through, those two documents need to match, so before anything else could move, we worked on getting the tax declaration converted and properly tagged to the title.

Then there was everything inside the house. Shipping furniture and belongings to the US would have cost a small fortune, and paying for storage didn't make much sense either. In the end, the family decided to sell or give away most of it, letting go of the things while keeping the memories.

The surprise at the finish line

Just as we wrapped up the bank financing requirements and could finally see the finish line, we hit another snag. Mom didn't have a bank account in the Philippines.

When a buyer goes through bank financing, the bank releases the payment as a check made out to the owner named on the title. And under the Family Code of the Philippines, a property acquired during a marriage belongs to both spouses. That meant the check had to be issued in the names of both Mom and Dad, even though they had been separated for years and were living in different states. It's not a rule anyone can bend.

So we prepared two separate Special Powers of Attorney, one from Mom and one from Dad, each authorizing their daughter, our client, to act on their behalf. She flew to the Philippines with her husband to see it all through. And this is what made it extra challenging: she's half Filipino and half American, grew up in the States, and doesn't speak much of the language. Dealing with banks and government offices in a country you don't really know is not easy, so we stayed with her every step of the way. With the SPAs in hand, she opened a local bank account, deposited the check, and set it up so the proceeds could be sent back to the family in the US.

What this deal taught us

Very little about this sale was standard. A seller with no local bank account, separated co-owners living in two different states, an attorney-in-fact who is an American citizen, and paperwork that hadn't been touched in years. We had to change a lot of how we normally run a transaction to fit what this family needed, and we're better for it.

But that's really the job. Selling a house is rarely just about the house. Sometimes it's about helping a family close a chapter with care, especially when they can't be here to do it themselves.

If you or your family live abroad and have a property in Baguio you need to sell, we can handle it from start to finish, even when the paperwork isn't ready yet. Reach out to us at www.REMAXARYA.com.