My mother passed away in November and left the house to me & my brother 50/50. Probate is in progress, using a solicitor for that, but the question is about the sale itself once we have the grant.
The probate solicitor has quoted us £2,400 plus VAT for the conveyancing on the sale. That feels steep for what is a straightforward freehold semi with no chain. I have seen online conveyancers quoting £800 to £1,000 all in.
- Is there any practical reason the probate solicitor needs to do the conveyancing as well?
- Can we instruct a separate (cheaper) conveyancer once we have the grant?
- Anything we should watch out for with the title transfer from the estate to us before sale?
The house is in the West Midlands, no mortgage, registered title. We both want a quick clean sale, no disagreement between us on price or timing. Just trying not to spend more than we need to.
No, there is absolutely no reason the probate solicitor has to do the conveyancing, and you should expect them to try fairly hard to keep you because it is easy money on their end once they already have the file. When I sold my BTL flat I got a quote from the solicitor who had handled the original purchase and it was nearly double what a panel conveyancer quoted, for what turned out to be a completely standard transaction with no complications at all. The only thing I would say is make sure whoever you instruct understands that the property is being sold as personal representatives rather than as beneficial owners in your own right, because the mechanics of the transfer are slightly different and some of the cheaper online outfits can be a bit slow on the uptake with that. But £2,400 plus VAT for a straightforward freehold sale with no chain is, to put it politely, ambitious.
@Frankie91 thanks, that confirms what I suspected. Quick follow up, do we actually need to wait for the grant before instructing a separate conveyancer? The probate solicitor has been maddeningly vague on timescales, just “a few months” which could mean anything. My brother wants to get the house on the market ASAP but I don’t want to pay for conveyancing work that can’t actually proceed yet.
@borderer61 you can get it on the market and take offers before the grant comes through, that is not an issue, and plenty of people do it. What you cannot do is exchange contracts until you have the grant because the legal title has not passed to you yet, so any conveyancer you instruct will just be doing the prep work and then sitting on their hands waiting. Whether that is worth the cost of instructing them now depends a bit on how confident you are the grant is coming through cleanly, ie no contested will, no missing assets that might slow things down. If it is straightforward then yes, get them instructed, get the searches ordered, and you will be ready to move the moment the grant lands. The risk is that some buyers will see “probate pending” on the listing and walk, because they have heard horror stories about it taking eighteen months, and to be fair sometimes it does. But in a clean case with a simple estate it should not be more than a few months, especially if the solicitor has their act together, which I realise is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.