§ 8.01-464.Order of liability between alienees of different parts of estate.

A judgment lien attaches to all the debtor’s real estate at once, but debtors sometimes sell off pieces of that real estate to different buyers over time. Section 8.01-464 supplies the marshaling rule that decides, when the land subject to the lien is worth more than needed to satisfy the judgment, which parcel gets hit first so that later buyers are not unfairly exposed ahead of earlier ones.

Among buyers who paid value for their parcels, the rule runs in reverse chronological order: whichever parcel was aliened last is first liable in equity, working backward through each earlier sale until the judgment is satisfied. The identical last-in-first-liable sequence applies separately among volunteers — people who received land from the debtor as a gift rather than for value.

Between those two categories, though, volunteers come first: land given away is subjected to the lien before land sold to a paying purchaser is touched. And ahead of both, any part of the real estate the debtor still owns himself must be exhausted first. The section closes with a wrinkle for a value purchaser who buys from a volunteer rather than from the debtor directly — that purchaser occupies the same position he would have occupied had he bought straight from the debtor at the time he bought from the volunteer.