The USDA Program That Helps Heirs Clear Title

The Heirs’ Property Relending Program (HPRP) is a USDA Farm Service Agency program that lends money to approved intermediary lenders, who then relend it to heirs so they can buy out co-owners and cover the appraisal, survey, mediation, and legal costs of clearing title. It does not finance an outside buyer’s purchase of the land.

What is the Heirs’ Property Relending Program?

HPRP is a federal relending program, authorized by the 2018 Farm Bill, that channels low-cost capital through nonprofit and cooperative lenders to heirs trying to resolve fractured ownership on land passed down without a will or a completed estate settlement. USDA does not lend to heirs directly; it lends to a small number of approved intermediaries first.

The Farm Service Agency published the rule implementing HPRP in the Federal Register on August 9, 2021, alongside broader changes to how FSA delivers farm loan programs, according to the Federal Register. Under that rule, FSA lends up to $5 million to each approved intermediary lender at 1 percent interest, and the intermediary then relends those funds to individual heirs at rates the lender sets to cover its own operating costs, according to Farmers.gov. The heir repays the intermediary lender; the intermediary lender repays USDA.

The program targets a specific, well-documented gap. Heirs’ property is land that descended to multiple family members without going through a completed probate, so the descendants have the right to use it but no single one of them holds clear, marketable title, according to the Land Trust Alliance. Without a clear chain of title, a family generally cannot get a mortgage, a home-equity loan, or most farm credit against the property, because a lender has no single borrower who can pledge the whole parcel as collateral. HPRP exists to break that logjam from the inside, by giving the family itself, not an outside lender against the land, the money to buy out the interests standing in the way.

What can HPRP loan funds actually pay for?

HPRP loan funds can pay for two connected things: buying out a co-owner’s fractional interest in the property, and covering the professional costs required to get title clean enough to convey or finance. Both uses are aimed squarely at resolving ownership within the family, not at outside transactions.

Eligible uses listed by Farmers.gov include financing the purchase or consolidation of fractional interests held by other heirs, plus closing costs, appraisals, title searches, surveys, document preparation, mediation, and legal services tied to developing and carrying out a succession plan. In practice, that covers most of what stalls a heirs’ property case: an heir who wants out gets paid for their share, a title company or attorney gets paid to search the chain of title, and a mediator gets paid to help a large, scattered family agree on next steps rather than heading straight to a partition action.

What can’t an HPRP loan pay for?

HPRP loans cannot pay for land improvements, building acquisition or repair, personal property, ongoing farm operating costs, or finder’s fees, and the program is not a purchase-money loan for someone outside the family to acquire the land. This is a title-clearing and buyout tool, not general-purpose financing.

The eligibility rule makes the third-party restriction explicit by design rather than by exception: an HPRP borrower must be an individual or legal entity that is “a family member or heir-at-law related by blood or marriage” to the person who previously owned the property, and must agree to complete a succession plan, according to Farmers.gov. An unrelated investor or a company looking to purchase the parcel outright cannot use this program to fund that purchase, no matter how clouded the title is. If you are researching HPRP because you are trying to finance a purchase of land you found for sale, this is the wrong program; it exists to keep property inside the family that already owns it, not to help a new buyer acquire it.

Who is eligible to receive an HPRP loan?

Eligible heirs are individuals or entities who hold, or are entitled to hold, an ownership interest in property inherited without a clear, updated title, and who have the legal authority to incur debt and resolve ownership on behalf of that interest. The land does not have to be actively farmed, though the program grew out of USDA’s farm loan programs.

Borrowers must be related to the previous owner by blood or marriage, and must commit to completing a succession plan as part of the loan, per Farmers.gov. On the lending side, an intermediary must be a certified community development financial institution with experience originating and servicing agricultural and commercial loans. When USDA has more applications from prospective intermediaries than funding, it gives first preference to organizations with at least ten years serving socially disadvantaged farmers in states that have adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, a list that includes Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, and the Virgin Islands, according to Farmers.gov.

The program itself does not fix a single interest rate, loan term, or repayment structure for heir-level borrowing; Farmers.gov states that the selected intermediary lenders determine the rates, terms, and payment structure for the loans they make to heirs. That means two families in different states, working with different approved lenders, can end up with different repayment schedules for functionally the same kind of buyout loan. It is worth asking a lender directly, before signing anything, how the loan term compares to what the family would pay an attorney and appraiser out of pocket over the same period.

Who are the approved intermediary lenders, and how does a family reach one?

A family cannot apply to USDA directly for an HPRP loan; they have to go to one of the intermediary lenders USDA has already approved, and that list is still short. USDA opened the first application window for intermediary lenders from August 30 to October 29, 2021, then announced the first three approved lenders on August 18, 2022.

USDA made more than $100 million available for relending when it opened the program to lenders, and each approved intermediary can draw up to $5 million from FSA at 1 percent interest to relend locally, according to the Farm Service Agency. USDA has indicated it will keep approving additional intermediary lenders in future rounds, so a family whose state is not yet covered by one of these three should check with their local USDA Service Center periodically rather than assume the program does not apply to them.

How does a family actually apply?

A family starts by contacting the intermediary lender that serves their state or tribal area directly, not the USDA county office, since the intermediary underwrites and closes the actual heir-level loan. The lender will walk the family through what it needs to document ownership, relationship to the prior owner, and the succession plan the loan requires.

Heirs working with a lender in a state that has not adopted specific heirs’-property protections may find the process slower, since there is no statutory buyout window or mandatory appraisal process pushing the case forward the way there is in a court partition. Families dealing with land held for generations without a will often benefit from pairing an HPRP loan with legal aid or a heirs’-property nonprofit that can help identify every living heir before a lender will finalize a succession plan; the Land Trust Alliance’s Heirs’ Property Toolkit, developed with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, is aimed at exactly that kind of title-clearing groundwork. Confirming who holds an interest, and getting each name into the chain of title, has to happen before any lender will close a loan meant to consolidate those interests.

How is this different from a court partition action?

HPRP is a voluntary, negotiated route to resolving heirs’ property, while a partition action is a lawsuit one co-owner can file to force a division or sale even if the rest of the family objects. The two are not mutually exclusive, but a family that qualifies for HPRP financing generally avoids the cost and timeline of litigation entirely.

A partition case runs through the court where the land sits, typically involves a court-appointed appraiser, and can end in the land being physically split or sold on the open market regardless of what any individual heir wanted, as governed by whatever partition statute the state where the land sits has adopted. An HPRP-financed buyout, by contrast, only moves forward if the heirs involved agree to the succession plan and the loan terms; nobody is forced into it. The tradeoff is availability: partition statutes exist in every state, while as of late 2022 an HPRP loan is only reachable through one of the three approved intermediary lenders and the states or tribal areas they actually serve.

What happens after title is clear?

Clearing title through HPRP does not force a family to do anything in particular with the land afterward; it simply gives everyone a marketable, sellable interest instead of a fractional share tangled up with distant relatives. Some families keep farming or holding the land jointly once ownership is resolved. Others decide, once the heirs’ property problem is fixed, that they would rather sell than continue managing shared ownership from out of state.

If that is the direction a family lands on, AMM Land Sales makes cash offers on vacant land directly to owners in all 50 states, including land that started out as inherited land before title was cleared. AMM Land Sales is not a licensed real estate brokerage and does not represent any of the heirs, charges no commission or fee to sellers, and pays closing costs; every purchase closes through a licensed title company. Families further along in the process, including those who used HPRP funds to consolidate ownership in states like Georgia, can find more general context on resolving title issues before a sale in our guide to selling problem land.

HPRP will not fit every family’s situation, particularly if no approved lender yet covers the state where the land sits, but for heirs who can reach one of the three lenders operating as of late 2022, it is a meaningfully cheaper path to clear title than paying an attorney and an appraiser out of pocket while a partition case grinds through court.