Heirs property or tenancy in common is land that is typically passed to family members via a legal process called intestate succession—which means these properties are inherited outside of the probate system, or without a will.  As families proliferate over successive generations, literally hundreds of people could inherit fractional interests in these tenancies.  However, banks or other creditors won’t accept heirs’ property as collateral, which makes it very difficult for families to use these assets as leverage to build wealth.  
While heirs’ property has been found to concentrate in African American communities and in rural, central Appalachian counties, there are few, up to date, robust estimates of the extent of this phenomenon because of the very labor intensive, work that goes into identifying heirs’ parcels.
In 2015, the US Forest Service Southern Research Station partnered with the Carl Vinson Institute of Government with the University of Georgia, to automate the process of heirs’ property identification using data from county-level taxing authorities.  These are computer-assisted mass appraisal or CAMA data.  Researchers use characteristics associated with the property itself, such as recency of sale or whether the property has a financial caretaker, to identify potential heirs’ parcels.  In Georgia, heirs’ properties were estimated for 10 counties--Calhoun, Clay, Dougherty, Taliaferro, Telfair, Athens-Clarke, Bibb, Evans, Jasper, and McIntosh County with an appraised value of roughly $2.15 billion.