Short answer. Yes. The default rule requires the seller of an inheritance to pay the buyer for any fruits he already profited from or received from the estate, but the Civil Code lets the parties stipulate the contrary. If your contract says the seller keeps the fruits already collected, that agreement controls instead of the default rule.
What the law says
Should the vendor have profited by some of the fruits or received anything from the inheritance sold, he shall pay the vendee thereof, if the contrary has not been stipulated.
Civil Code, Article 1632 — Fruits Already Received by the Seller of an Inheritance. Read the full provision →
The default rule on fruits already collected
Article 1632 of the Civil Code deals with the sale of an inheritance as a whole. Its default rule is that if the seller had already profited from some of the fruits of the estate, or had already received something from it, before the sale, he must pay the buyer the value of that benefit. The idea is that once the inheritance is sold, the buyer steps into the seller's position with respect to the estate, and anything the seller already extracted from it belongs, in principle, to the buyer going forward.
The stipulation to the contrary
The article ends with the qualifier "if the contrary has not been stipulated," which makes the payment obligation a default rather than a mandatory rule. Seller and buyer are free to agree that the seller keeps whatever fruits or benefits he already collected from the inheritance, instead of turning their value over. Once that stipulation is part of the sale, it replaces the statutory default entirely, and the seller is under no obligation under this article to account to the buyer for fruits he already received.
Why parties negotiate this term
Sales of an entire inheritance are often priced with an eye to what has already been distributed or collected from the estate at the time of the sale. A seller who already gathered rents, harvests, or other fruits from estate property before selling may negotiate to keep them, with the sale price itself adjusted to reflect that the buyer is not also getting those fruits' value. Whether the parties handle it through an outright stipulation letting the seller keep the fruits, or through a price adjustment, is a matter for their own agreement rather than something the statute dictates.
What to put in writing
Because the statutory default only applies when the contract is silent, a seller who wants to keep fruits already collected, and a buyer who wants to avoid disputes later, both benefit from stating the arrangement explicitly in the deed of sale rather than relying on silence. Identifying what fruits or amounts were already received as of the sale date, and stating plainly that the seller keeps them, removes the ambiguity that Article 1632's default rule exists to resolve when the contract does not address the point.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Perpetua Vda. De Ape vs. The Honorable Court of Appeals, et al, G.R. No. 133638, April 15, 2005 — read the decision on LawPhil →