to ask you advice on selling a house please

[yolofish]

We have to sell DM's house, now she has passed away.

I am getting conflicting advice: estate agent said apply for probate straight away so sale can go through with no hassle. Makes sense.

Solicitor today says that probate only takes 2 weeks (will very straightforward) and therefore we should go to market and when an offer is near then apply for probate. This might put me off buying...

Spoke to agent: they say, get the house on the market by Christmas Day as apparently there is a huge spike in online searches then. (And of course means agent gets a nice sale on their books early into the new year). All photos done etc.

Waiting for call back from senior estate agent as to whether to push the button, ask solicitor to go for probate and market for Christmas Day - anyone got any advice?

Don’t know re probate but it’s true zoopla and Rightmove are at their busiest ‘hits’ over the Christmas period.

I don’t get why you’d put off applying for probate, but not having probate yet isn’t a reason to delay putting the house on the market. It’s definitely worth getting the Christmas holiday search hits.

The lady I bought my current house from sadly died during the process. Her adult children had to sort probate to continue the sale. It maybe added 2 weeks to the process, it wasn’t something that put me off buying.

Hi op. Speaking from experience (I work in a solicitors) solicitor may say it takes 2 weeks where you are but it could take anything up to 3 months. It depends on the back log in the court and how quick the solicitor sorts the paper work.

Don't go with what the estate agent says they won't get their money any quicker if the probate is held up and they will just put added pressure on you, which you don't need.

Get the solicitor to apply for the probate so that if there is an offer made at least the paper work is in place. Also make sure they have all the other financial documents in place I.e bank accounts, post office accounts, shares etc so that doesn't hold anything up either.

Best of luck.

Do your estate agents want probate to be granted before marketing?

And doesn’t probate need to be done anyway?

Don’t know why either of your advisors isn’t getting on with just doing them. Apart from perhaps workloads on the part of your solicitor. I’d ask them both to proceed, I think.

Have you asked your solicitor why they want to delay? What point or benefit do they see in that?

We looked at buying a house where probate hadn't gone through and it put us off. We were told it'd only be a few weeks but there was no definite date.
We looked at another one waiting for probate and there were 4 beneficiaries so all decisions had to go through each one of them, including one who didn't want to sell as he wanted to buy the house at a greatly reduced price. We backed out of that one too.

Thank you all!

Solicitor said that probate will only take 2 weeks because there is now a 'triage' system for probate? And that by holding off we would delay the fact that council tax exemption only lasts for 6 months after probate is granted. TBH I think the house will sell quickly, its a good house in a nice area, nothing wrong with it etc etc.

I can see the Christmas property search thing, I get that. We could probably do both at the same time I guess - ie put on market and tell solicitor to get probate moving.

Probate can take varying lengths of time depending on the complexity of the will and where you live.
My friend is STILL waiting for probate and her father died on 11/11 - last year!!
There’s no harm in getting probate applied for ASAP.
If I were you I would be applying for probate and getting the house put online since the Christmas period seems busy for online hits. If the pictures are all done and it’s ready to go why wait.

It always staggers me how so much winds down for Christmas and how things don’t start again until the new year, it’s one day! (Plus Boxing Day and NYD) .
You have got nothing holding you back so press on.