probate

[Putthatbookdown]

When someone dies does it have to go through probate even if they have very little or nothing to leave

No. Only if they've got assets that need to be formally transferred, like a house.

if the house is already joint tenants ie they each leave their half to each other do you still need to go through probate?

No. IIRC you fill in a firm and send a copy of the death cert to the land registry.

Generally speaking it depends on the requirements of the individual financial institutions concerned. Some banks will allow you to close an account with £10k in it without the need for a grant of probate, others require it for smaller sums. I am dealing with an estate at the moment where the deceased had a shareholding value at £7. The company want a grant before they will release the funds !
With property a grant will not be needed where it was owned as joint tenants and automatically passes by survivorship. If the deceased had shares, pensions, life insurance etc you may need a grant to encash one or all of them.
If the property was owned as tenants in common ( as opposed to joint tenants) you will need a grant.

we have a real problem We had a flat as joint tenants but it looks like the lawyers mucked up When one died it has passed not to the survivor but to someone else We can only presume the lawyers screwed up and registered it wrong How do we find out how this happened?

You look at what you told your solicitor you wanted, when you bought it.

Was there a will? If so did it leave the half share of the property to someone else? A tenancy can be severed posthumously in certain specific circumstances.

After you bought the property the solicitors should have sent you a copy of the registration documents. Do you have them? Did you check them at the time to make sure they were correct?

We cannot remember as it was 12 years ago but recently when we looked we saw that our copy of the TR1 was incomplete ie the boxes for the joint tenency etc had been left blank We presume the Land Reistry therefore used a default ie tenants in common as they received incomplete info

The current TR1 does say that a form A Restriction will be entered if the joint tenancy box is not ticked - basically giving you a tenancy in common.

In the first instance you could make a complaint to the solicitor who dealt with the purchase but after 12 years it could be difficult to prove either way, after all you must have signed the TR1 without reading it.

Has it been more than 2 years since the person who owned the joint property died ? If not then you could vary the estate to pass the half share of the property to the "rightful" owner ( although you will need the beneficiary's agreement).

What is the exact situation OP ? Were you co-habiting but not married to the joint owner who has died intestate leaving the property share to a child ? With more information I may be able to provide more specific advice.

We were relatives and bought and sold 3 properties always as joint tenants but when we checked the third property paperwoork we found it incomplete compared to the others The intent has always been joint tenants we just assumed the solicitor would follow our wishes This is a nightmare The others solicitors always went through the tenancy bit with us giving us written info etc so we understtod so we do not understand what has gone wrong