Property Law

• Real Estate Transactions
  Ceci has worked with a wide variety of real estate transactions in her 30+ years as a real estate professional. She has sold everything from vacant land to high-end residential as well as leased both residential and commercial spaces. Her clients have ranged from investors to first time home buyers of all ages. However, her passion is working with buyers and sellers of residential properties on the mid-peninsula where she has lived most of her life.

Trusts and Estates

• Estate Planning
  Force 7: The rise in the gift and estate tax to allow individuals to pass over $5.25 million (couples with estate planning can pass over $10 million) to heirs with a stepped-up tax basis on real-estate assets has encouraged many with huge capital gains to hold on to their real estate until death. A surprisingly large percentage of home listings were due to a death. The heirs can sell and skip out on most, if not all, of the taxes mentioned above. However, our population is living longer than ever before. This, along with the tax incentive not to sell, is deferring any decision to sell. A minor force in this process as well are Propositions 58 and 193, which in some cases allows all parents or children and even grandchildren to “inherit” the property-tax basis when a qualifying property is gifted or inherited. The value of low property taxes has soared as the value of real estate has escalated in the last 25 years.