the Estate of Barbara A. Sloan

496 S.W.3d 299, 2016 Tex. App. LEXIS 6426, 2016 WL 3364658
Court of Appeals of Texas·Decided June 16, 2016·No. NO. 02-15-00198-CV·Published·Cited by 2 cases

Opinion

OPINION

TERRIE LIVINGSTON, CHIEF JUSTICE

This appeal raises the question of whether a surviving spouse’s constitutional homestead right in a decedent spouse’s separate real property, allowing the surviving spouse to live at the property for the remainder of that spouse’s life, affects the fair market value of the property. In two issues, appellant Shawn Wolfe, as the independent executor of the estate of Hollis Glenn Sloan (Wolfe), appeals the trial court’s judgment awarding damages to ap-pellee James D. Sanford, as co-trustee of the Barbara A. Sloan Family Trust, the Barbara A. Sloan GST Exempt Trust, and the Barbara A. Sloan Non-GST Exempt Trust — Marital (Sanford). We hold that the surviving spouse’s homestead right affected and reduced the property’s fair market value, so we reverse the judgment of the trial court, which rests on the opposite conclusion.

Background Facts

" The material facts in this appeal are undisputed. Hollis and Barbara Sloan were married from 1972 until 2001, when Barbara died. Before her death, they lived at a house on Winton Terrace West in Fort Worth (the Winton Terrace Property). The property was their homestead. Barbara acquired the property through a warranty deed in 1999. The warranty deed recited that the property was Barbara’s “sole and separate property.” To help purchase the property, Barbara took out a $50,000 loan. Hollis signed a deed of trust to help secure the $50,000 loan, and the loan was repaid with community funds.

Barbara’s will appointed Hollis, who was sixty-eight years old at the time of her death, as the independent executor of her estate.- It also authorized Hollis to “purchase any assets from [Barbara’s] estate for their fair market value.” The will created three trusts, appointed Hollis as the trusts’ initial trustee, and made him a beneficiary of the trusts. Finally, the will bequeathed all of the real property Barbara owned, including the Winton Terrace Property, to the trusts that the will created.

After Barbara’s death, Hollis continued to live at the Winton Terrace Property, and he'claimed the property as his homestead. In the course of the administration of Barbara’s estate, Hollis filed an inventory in which he assigned values to property she owned. On that inventory and on a tax return for Barbara’s estate, Hollis listed several tracts of real property that Barbara had owned as rentals and also listed the Winton Terrace Property, for which Hollis valued the estate’s interest at $222,000. In December 2003, Hollis conveyed his interest in several rental properties to Barbara’s estate in exchange for the estate’s interest in the Winton Terrace Property. The total consideration paid by *302 Hollis for the estate’s interest in the Win-ton Terrace Property was $222,000 worth of rental properties. 1

Hollis died in 2007. His will named Wolfe as his estate’s independent executor. 2 Wolfe and Sanford are siblings and co-trustees of the trusts created by Barbara’s will. In July 2009, Sanford sued Wolfe individually and in her capacity as the independent executor of Hollis’s estate. In his original petition, Sanford alleged that Hollis had violated a fiduciary duty when he had sold the Winton Terrace Property from himself as the executor of Barbara’s estate to himself individually without paying fair market value and without acting in good faith. Sanford recognized that Barbara’s will gave Hollis authority to buy the Winton Terrace Property for fair market value, but Sanford contended that when Hollis had bought the property, he had incorrectly characterized it as community property and had therefore paid an amount equaling half of the property’s fair market value. Sanford asserted that because of Hollis’s “improper handling of the transaction, [Barbara’s] Trusts did not receive adequate value for the sale of the Property” and lost out on rental income that the property could have generated. As relief, Sanford asked for damages “sufficient to compensate the Trusts for the mishandling of the transaction by Hollis.” He also sought declarations that the Winton Terrace Property was Barbara’s separate property and that Hollis’s purchase of it was not conducted in accordance with Barbara’s will.

Wolfe filed an answer in which she contended that Hollis had a homestead interest in the Winton Terrace Property and that the compensation that he paid for the property was adequate. Wolfe also alleged that to the extent that Hollis’s and Barbara’s community funds were used to repay Barbara’s $50,000 loan obligation on the property, Hollis’s estate was entitled to reimbursement, which could affect whether he paid fair market value for the property.

Wolfe and Sanford each sought summary judgment. In her motion, Wolfe contended that the Winton Terrace Property was community property at the time of Barbara’s death. She also contended that even if the property was Barbara’s separate property, Hollis’s homestead right in the property for the remainder of his life decreased the value of Barbara’s estate’s interest and made Hollis’s $222,000 payment for the property adequate. 3 Specifically, she argued,

*303 It cannot be seriously doubted that [Hollis’s] right to live in the house for the rest of his life decrease[d] the value anyone would otherwise be willing to pay for Barbara Sloan’s Estate’s interest in Winton Terrace. The next obvious question is how [to] value the diminution ... of Barbara’s Estate’s interest in Winton Terrace caused by [Hollis’s] homestead right.... [T]he proper way to value an interest in property subject to a homestead is to use the IRS Life Tables. Those tables establish the different values for the life tenant and the remainderman depending on the age of the life tenant. For a man of [Hollis’s] age in 2003, the value of his life estate was 47.346% of the total value while the estate’s remainder interest was 52.654% of the total.

In Sanford’s motion, he contended that while Barbara’s will gave Hollis the right to purchase property from her estate for fair market value, he purchased the Win-ton Terrace Property for substantially less than fair market value because he incorrectly characterized it as community property and therefore incorrectly lowered the value of Barbara’s interest from $444,000 to $222,000. Sanford argued that Hollis had breached a fiduciary duty in his purchase of the Winton Terrace Property.

The trial court initially decided to deny both parties’ motions, stating that fact disputes precluded summary judgment. The parties then filed a joint submittal of facts and legal issues while agreeing that there were “no genuine issues of material fact and that the [trial court] should resolve the disputes between the parties purely as a matter of law.” Concerning the legal issues presented, the parties stated,

The initial legal issue for the Court to decide is whether the Property located at 2324 Winton Terrace West was the separate property of Barbara A. Sloan, as argued by Plaintiff, or whether it was the community property of Barbara and Hollis Sloan, as argued by Defendant. If the Court concludes that the Property was Barbara Sloan’s community property, no further finding is necessary.

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the Estate of Barbara A. Sloan, 496 S.W.3d 299, 2016 Tex. App. LEXIS 6426, 2016 WL 3364658 (Tex. Ct. App. 2016).

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