[eru]

What kinds of legal reasons?

[giaour]

The property's transfer or sale may be prohibited by the terms of inheritance.

IANAL and am mostly familiar with this type of situation from rom-coms about down-on-their-luck dukes who live in crumbling, unsellable castles, so I'm not sure if that scenario truly exists in law or if it's just a handy conceit.

[kenjackson]

I prefer the rule where you must spend $30 million dollars in 30 days, but have no trace of the money left — yet still have received fair value for your spending — in order to get the inheritance.

[eru]

That's pretty easy:

You go to a bank to manufacture you a derivative on eg the stock market. The deal is that you pay them 30 million dollars now, and in 30 days they either pay you x dollars with probability p or you lose everything.

Eg they pay you 100 million dollars, if the S&P 500 index goes above, say, 5000 which they think will happen with probability of just under 30%.

If you do the math: the deal is fair.

If you lose the bet, you get your inheritance.

If you win the bet, you get your 100 million dollars from the bank, and presumably pay the 30 million dollars back (if that's a stipulation in the will).

[eru]

Yes, this seems much more common in fiction than in reality.

[gambiting]

You live in the place already but there are inheritance matters still waiting to be settled. Or you inherit 20% along with 4 other siblings, they don't want to sell but they won't contribute or live in the place. Or you might simply not have the money for the legal process to sell. The place might need work before you could even put it on the market but you don't have the money for it.

[eru]

You can put things on the market, even if there's work to be done.

> Or you might simply not have the money for the legal process to sell.

If your property is valuable, someone will be willing do that work for you in return for a cut of the proceeds. (And if your property ain't valuable, then the original comment doesn't apply.)