This is long and complicated... apologies in advance, and thanks for reading.
My OH and I bought a house with my mother in law. We paid the mortgage, all bills, looked after everything including her. She provided the deposit through the sale of her own house. Her name was not on the deeds.
Four years on, MIL died. It happened rather suddenly, in late 2017. OH has one brother, resident in the US for donkey's years. They have never been close.
BIL wants his inheritance, which is mostly the proceeds from the sale of their mother's house, and is therefore tied up in our home. She owned about a 36 percent share of the place so we owe him about 18 percent of the total current value. There is no legal paperwork covering any of this (we did consult a solicitor before MIL died but he was making it all so convoluted there wouldn't have been anything left once his fees had been paid) but we are quite clear that we owe BIL that percentage and I don't think there's any argument on that front.
The problem is timing. BIL is well off (owns properties in New York), and as Brexit is obviously knocking the UK economy and house prices, we suggested waiting for things to improve before selling (he would of course benefit from any price improvement). He seemed OK with this at first but has since changed his mind.
We put the house on the market in March, as soon as we realised he didn't in fact want to wait. Things rapidly turned nasty (he doesn't believe we're really trying to sell and keeps suggesting we're up to all sorts, including having forced his mum to sign secret documents in our favour (not the case!)). We remortgaged as much as we could and released £60k, which we offered to give him while we try to raise the rest, but for some reason he refused that. (We owe him about £175k in total.)
He is demanding to be kept in the loop with the estate agents, to know about all viewings etc.
We are at our wits' end. We've never tried to lie or cheat. In fact we worked our bums off getting the house in perfect order for sale. There have been no proceedable offers, and all we're getting is demands to know when he'll be paid. I could of course show him all the emails I exchange with the agents but who is he - who stood back and watched me change his mother's colostomy bag when he visited while she was sick - to decide I can't be trusted and need to prove myself to him? It's bad enough having an unwanted house move hanging over you, plus the worry about where you'll go, without having this man barking demands and accusations from across the pond. You might wonder why if we have nothing to hide we don't just show him the correspondence - but I don't think it would end there. Judging by his behaviour so far, he'd be all over the agents, trying to get the price dropped and running the sale from afar.
We don't have much equity - the house needed a lot of work and we probably paid too much for it - and of course if we do manage to sell we will have to pay stamp duty and moving costs so we'll be limping off with not a lot to show for the last few years.
On top of that we'll be putting our eight-year-old daughter through a house move not long after she lost her live-in grandma - a major bereavement for her as she can't remember a time when they didn't live together and they were very close.
We put the house straight up for sale and have done our best. But all we've had in return is bullying, and it's making us feel like taking the house off the market.
My question is, do we actually HAVE to sell the house right now? The split is roughly 1/5 ownership to BIL vs 4/5 to us, so do we really have to do what he says and be bullied into selling at a terrible time? Even if we sell at the full asking price (which we won't) we'll be losing out a lot. Can he force us to accept a low offer or drop the price until someone eventually buys? What's the state of play?
At the moment we're jumping when BIL says jump - but is that right?
The estate is currently with a different solicitor who is looking after applying for probate, but she represents the estate (and both brothers are executors) so she wouldn't be able to act for us.
We have obviously reached a stage where we do need legal advice and will start looking for another solicitor on Monday. Meanwhile I wondered if anyone could offer their thoughts as I feel like I've read the whole internet and can't find anyone who's in the same situation as us!
Thank you.