I get what you are saying. Is there a way your mom would be open to letting you handle renting out the house, and giving her the rental income to add towards retirement? If you can show her that it can be profitable, you might be able to stall while you save up the money to buy it from her. You would be like the acting property manager. Otherwise, it may not be worth it to keep. Houses cost a lot of money whether someone is living in them or not. And it sounds like there are already some potential maintenance needs.
Getting the money now and investing it towards her retirement, would work out better for her, than waiting to sell it. There’s no way you would be able to make up the time loss. It sounds like she is willing to sacrifice that time to give you a chance, but I would honestly question your motivation for keeping this house, and how committed you are. It sounds like your emotions may be a little heightened Because of the passing of your grandmother. Find out what the costs are to maintain the house, what the cost would be to repair it, and what the cost would be to fix it to the point that it qualifies for landlords insurance. If those things don’t scare you off, then perhaps it’s something worth pursuing. But while keeping it in the family may sound nice and make you warm and fuzzy, your mom might be seeing a more realistic side of it.
You say you want to keep it in the family, but then at the same time you say you expect it to be an investment because of the value. This would mean eventually selling it, therefore not keeping in the family. And if you want to keep it for sentimental reasons because it reminds you of your grandmother, will those feelings change with strangers living in there, such as renters? Do you personally have a hope of living in the house? What you want to do would make more sense, if you had the intention of living in the house. And I don’t believe you mentioned that in your comment, though I may have missed it.
I get where you are coming from I think. My grandmother is still alive, and I have an attachment to her house since I grew up in it. And while I love the house, and my grandfather did a lot of work on it himself, I couldn’t see myself living in the house or the area. I am a perspective property investor, and already own one rental property that was my former residence, so I definitely played with the idea of swooping in and buying it myself, but when I really thought about it, turning it into an investment property would alter my feelings about the property, and it wouldn’t adequately feed that desire to be connected to the past and to my grandmother. In a way, it actually might change that connection. I am mentally preparing myself to be OK with my father and aunt selling it when it’s time.
My grandmother has a painting of the house she grew up in, and she refers to it often. I would definitely consider doing something like that, to keep the house, how you would like to remember it. My grandmother worked her whole life on her beautiful gardens, and I fully intend on having a professional photographer take photos of the house and the garden, And I’d like to do it while she is still alive so she can see them, and be in them.
There are many ways, and much less expensive ways, to maintain that connection after a loved one has passed. I don’t know if this is all sentimental for you, since you are coming at it from an investment point of view, but at the same time I sort of sense that you’re using the hope that it would be a good investment, as an excuse to hold on.