FAQ
Top 10 Questions About Selling a Probate Flat
If you are an executor or administrator with a leasehold flat to sell, this page answers the questions that come up most. Whether you can sell before the grant, how long it all takes, who has to sign, the inheritance and capital gains tax points, the bills while the flat sits empty and which way of selling suits an estate. The answers reflect the law in England and Wales as it stands in 2026.
Probate Flat Sales: The Full Picture
A probate sale is an ordinary flat sale with three things added: a wait for a court document, a layer of tax and a group of people who all have to agree. None of them is difficult once you know the sequence, but each one catches out executors who are selling a flat for the first time.
This page works through the ten questions executors and administrators ask most. It assumes the flat was in the sole name of the person who died. Where a flat was jointly owned, the survivor's position is different, and our guide to selling a flat after the death of a co-owner covers that. Our guide to the steps to take when selling a probate flat walks through the sale itself.
Sell Flat UK is a cash buying company that buys leasehold flats, including probate flats. A cash sale is one route among several. Where an estate agency sale or an auction would leave the estate better off, the page says so. This guide is general information, not legal, financial or tax advice. Executors are personally responsible for getting an estate right, so check your own position with a solicitor or a qualified adviser.
1. Can We Sell the Flat Before Probate Is Granted?
You can market the flat, hold viewings, accept an offer and instruct a solicitor before the grant arrives. What you cannot do is complete. The grant of probate (or letters of administration where there is no will) is the court's confirmation that you have authority to deal with the estate, and the buyer's solicitor will not hand over the money until it has been produced. Exchange of contracts, the point where both sides are legally bound, normally waits for the grant as well. A solicitor may occasionally advise a contract that is conditional on the grant, but most buyers' solicitors prefer to wait.
So the practical answer is to run the two tracks side by side. Apply for probate as early as you can, and while you wait, get the flat valued, choose how to sell it, instruct a conveyancing solicitor and let them gather the lease and the title and line up the management pack order. If the legal work is done by the time the grant lands, exchange and completion can follow within days.
Be open about the position from the start. Agents can market a flat "subject to probate", and buyers who know they are waiting for a grant tend to stay the course. Buyers who find out late often walk away. Cash buyers and investors are used to the wait. First-time buyers and anyone in a chain usually are not.
2. How Long Does Probate Take, and How Long Will the Sale Take?
Gov.uk says you will usually get the grant within 12 weeks of submitting the application. In mid-2026 HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported average waits of around four weeks for straightforward online applications, with paper applications and any application that is queried or stopped taking far longer. Treat 12 weeks as the working assumption and be pleased if it is quicker.
The application itself cannot go in until the estate has been valued, and that is often the slower part. A simple estate might take a few weeks to value. One with several accounts, lifetime gifts or a business can take months. Where inheritance tax is due, HMRC must first process the IHT400 account and receive the payment due at that stage, usually only the tax on the cash and investments, as question 4 explains. It then issues the code you need for the probate application. Allow up to 20 working days for that.
Add the sale on top. A sale to a cash buying company can exchange and complete within days of the grant if the conveyancing has run alongside the application. An estate agency sale typically takes three to four months from offer to completion in its own right, and for a leasehold flat the management pack and lease enquiries often stretch that. The timeline guides show where the weeks go on each route. Realistically, from death to completion, allow six to nine months for an estate agency sale and three to four months for a direct sale, and longer for either if the estate is complicated.
The application fee is £526 for an estate worth more than £5,000, with no fee below that. Extra copies of the grant cost £2 each if you order them with the application and £16 each later, so order a few: the conveyancing solicitor, the bank and the share registrar for any management company will all want one.
3. Who Has the Authority to Sell?
The people named on the grant. Where there is a will, they are the executors it appoints, and they take their authority from the will itself, which is why they can start preparing a sale before the grant. Where there is no will, the court appoints administrators under the intestacy rules, and their authority only starts when the letters of administration are issued. Either way, they are known collectively as personal representatives.
Everyone on the grant must act together. Each of them signs the sale contract and the transfer deed, and a buyer's solicitor will check the names against the grant. A grant can name up to four people. An executor who does not want the job can renounce before the grant is issued, or have power reserved so the others act without them. Both are simple forms at the application stage and much harder to sort out once the grant has been issued.
The personal representatives sell as the estate, not as beneficiaries. The beneficiaries are entitled to what is left after the debts, the tax and the costs, and the executors owe them a duty to get the best price reasonably obtainable. That does not mean holding out for the highest figure anyone mentions. It means making a sensible decision and being able to show why. Where the beneficiaries are the executors, which is common, the two roles still need to be kept distinct, as the Further FAQs on selling to family explain.
4. Do We Have to Pay Inheritance Tax Before We Can Sell?
Not all of it, and often very little of it. The worry executors have is a real one: the grant is needed to sell the flat, HMRC normally wants a payment before it issues the code you need to apply for the grant, and the flat is usually the asset that would pay the tax. But the rules are built with that in mind. Tax that relates to land and buildings can be paid in ten yearly instalments, and only the instalments that have already fallen due need to be paid before the grant.
The first instalment falls due at the end of the sixth month after the death. So an estate made up mostly of a flat and a modest bank balance usually pays only the tax on the cash and investments up front, applies for the grant, sells the flat and settles the rest from the sale proceeds. Interest runs on whatever is outstanding after the six-month deadline, so a prompt sale keeps that cost down.
Most estates pay nothing at all. Each person has a nil-rate band of £325,000, and where the home passes to children or grandchildren there is a further residence nil-rate band of up to £175,000. A surviving spouse or civil partner can also use whatever their late partner did not, so a second death can have up to £1 million of allowance. Both bands are frozen until 5 April 2031. Above the allowances the rate is 40 percent. Where no tax is due, there is nothing to pay before the grant and the application can go in straight away.
Where tax is due on the non-property part of the estate and the cash is tied up, there are standard ways to find it. Banks and building societies will pay HMRC directly from the deceased's accounts before the grant under the Direct Payment Scheme. Specialist lenders offer short-term probate loans repaid from the estate. Executors can pay from their own money and reimburse themselves after the grant. And where none of those is possible, HMRC can in cases of genuine hardship agree to a grant on credit, so that the tax is paid after the sale; it expects executors to show they have tried the other routes first.
One point many executors miss: if you sell the flat within four years of the death for less than the value you declared for inheritance tax, you can claim to substitute the sale price and get some of the tax back. The claim has to be made by the people who paid the tax, so it is lost if the flat is first transferred to a beneficiary and sold by them. It does not apply where the shortfall is under £1,000 or 5 percent of the value, whichever is lower, and sales in the fourth year count only if they are at a loss.
5. What Price Should We Put on the Flat?
Start by separating two numbers that executors often confuse. The probate value is the open-market value at the date of death, which you need for the inheritance tax account and which becomes the base cost for any capital gains tax later. The asking price is whatever you choose to market the flat at, months later, in whatever condition it is in. They are related but they are not the same thing.
For the probate value, HMRC expects a realistic figure. Where tax is at stake, or the flat is unusual, a written valuation from a RICS-registered surveyor on the Red Book basis is worth the £300 to £600 it typically costs, because HMRC's valuers can and do challenge figures that look low. Where the estate is well under the threshold, two or three estate agent appraisals are usually enough. Do not be tempted to put in a low figure to save tax. If the estate is under the threshold it saves nothing, and either way a low probate value simply moves the tax to capital gains later, at 24 percent on the difference.
For the asking price, treat the flat as what it is now: often unmodernised, sometimes with a short lease, and sold by people who want it done. Buyers of probate flats price in the work. If the flat has not been touched for decades, our guide to unmodernised flats explains how buyers think about the refurbishment cost, and the pricing mistakes guide covers the traps on asking price. The most common one in a probate sale is treating a generous estate agent appraisal, given to win the instruction, as the figure the estate will actually receive.
6. Will the Estate Pay Capital Gains Tax on the Sale?
Only on any rise in value since the death. The flat is treated as acquired by the estate at its probate value, so if it sells for more than that, the gain is the difference, less the costs of sale. If it sells for the probate value or less, there is no capital gains tax. There is never any capital gains tax on the rise in value during the deceased's lifetime: death wipes that slate clean.
Personal representatives pay 24 percent on residential property gains. They get the annual exempt amount, £3,000 in 2026/27, in the tax year of death and the two following tax years. Where tax is due, the estate must report the sale and pay within 60 days of completion. A quick sale soon after death rarely produces a gain large enough to matter. A sale two years on, in a rising market, can.
Where a gain is likely to be large, executors sometimes transfer the flat to the beneficiaries first and let them sell it. Each beneficiary then has their own £3,000 allowance, and a basic-rate taxpayer pays 18 percent on part of the gain rather than 24 percent across the board. The cost is extra legal work and the loss of the inheritance tax loss-on-sale relief described in question 4, so take advice before choosing. Our guide to capital gains tax when selling a flat has the full rules and a worked example.
7. Who Pays the Service Charge, Ground Rent and Bills While the Flat Is Empty?
The estate does, until completion. Service charge and ground rent carry on as the lease says, and a freeholder or managing agent will not release the management pack the buyer needs while there are significant arrears, so keep them paid. The same goes for the standing charges on gas and electricity, the water bill and any mortgage. Tell the managing agent about the death early. Most leases require it, and the agent needs to know who to send demands to.
Council tax is the one bill that usually stops. In England, a flat left empty since the death is exempt (Class F) until the grant is issued and for up to six months after it, as long as it stays empty and in the name of the person who died. Tell the council about the death so the exemption is applied. Once the six months are up, the full charge returns. After a flat has stood empty for a year, councils in England can add a premium of up to 100 percent on top. Two exceptions protect an estate. The premium cannot be charged for 12 months from the date of the grant, so the sequence is full exemption until the grant plus six months, then the standard charge, then the premium only from a year after the grant. And a flat that is genuinely on the market for sale is excepted for up to 12 months, so tell the council it is for sale.
Buildings insurance for a flat is normally the freeholder's block policy, paid through the service charge, so it does not lapse with the death. Contents cover usually does, and many policies also have conditions about unoccupied property, so check what the block policy requires: regular inspections, water turned off, heating kept on in winter. Our guide to looking after an empty flat has a checklist. For a flat that will sit empty for months, the running costs are a real argument for a quicker sale, and executors are entitled to weigh them.
8. Does a Short Lease or a Lease Problem Change Anything?
It changes who will buy and at what price, which is the same as in any sale, and a probate flat is more likely than most to have a lease that nobody has looked at for years. Check the lease length first. The title register from HM Land Registry costs £7 and shows the term and the start date, and our guide to checking how many years are left explains how to read it. At 80 years or fewer, extending costs more because marriage value applies. Below 70, most mortgage lenders will not lend, so the buyers are cash buyers and investors.
The estate can extend the lease itself. Since 31 January 2025 there is no two-year ownership rule, so personal representatives can start a statutory extension as soon as they have the grant, and a buyer can start one once they are registered as owner. In practice most estates do not extend first. It costs the estate money it may not have, takes months and ties the executors into a tribunal process if the freeholder argues about the price. The usual approach is to sell with the lease as it is, at a price that reflects it, or to serve the notice and let the buyer take the claim over. The short lease Top 10 covers both routes in detail.
Other lease problems surface at the same time: a ground rent that doubles, a missing freeholder, alterations the deceased made without consent, or arrears that nobody knew about. None of them stops a sale, but each one needs to be disclosed and priced. The sellers' guides cover each of these, and a cash buying company that deals with them every week will usually take them in its stride where a first-time buyer's lender will not.
9. What Documents Will the Buyer's Solicitor Ask For?
The same set as any leasehold sale, plus the grant. Your conveyancing solicitor will gather most of it, but executors save weeks by knowing what is coming and where to look:
- The grant of probate or letters of administration. The buyer's solicitor needs an official copy, and it is the one document only you can produce.
- The lease and the title. Both can be downloaded from HM Land Registry for £7 each if the originals are not in the flat. Our guide to getting a copy of the lease and title walks through it.
- The management pack (LPE1). Ordered from the freeholder or managing agent, usually £300 to £400 plus VAT, covering service charges, ground rent, planned works and the building's insurance. Order it once a buyer is in place, not months ahead, as the information goes stale.
- The property information forms (TA6 and TA7). Executors complete these from what they know, and it is normal to answer "not known" to questions about the flat's history. Say what you do know, such as any works the deceased had done or disputes with neighbours, because the buyer can rely on your answers.
- An energy performance certificate. Required for any sale. Check the national register first, as a certificate issued in the last ten years is still valid.
- Service charge and ground rent statements, buildings insurance details and any share certificate for a residents' management company, all of which are usually in the flat somewhere. Keep them when you clear it.
Where the deceased owned the flat for decades, expect gaps: a missing licence for an alteration, no completion certificate for a replaced boiler, a lease plan that no longer matches the flat. These are usually solved with an indemnity policy or a price adjustment rather than a chase for paperwork that no longer exists. Tell your solicitor about anything you suspect before you approach the freeholder, because contacting the freeholder first can rule out the indemnity route.
10. Which Way of Selling Suits a Probate Flat?
Three routes are open to an estate, and the right one depends on how much the beneficiaries value price over certainty and how long the estate can afford to carry the flat.
Estate agency sale
Usually the highest price, and the right choice for a flat in good condition with a long lease where the estate can wait. The risks are the wait itself and the buyer. A buyer who needs a mortgage, or who is in a chain, may not stay for a probate timetable, and a sale that collapses after months costs the estate the running costs of those months plus a relaunch. Choose an agent who is comfortable marketing subject to probate and who will say so in the listing.
Auction
Suits a flat with a short lease, a lease problem or a lot of work to do, because the bidders are investors who price those things in. The sale is binding when the hammer falls and completes on a fixed date, usually within 28 days. The catch is that the estate normally needs the grant in hand before the auction, since exchange happens on the day, and the price is whatever the room produces, often 10 to 20 percent below what an estate agency sale might reach. Our auction guide sets out the costs and the timetable.
Direct sale to a cash buying company
The quickest and the most certain, and the only route that can be lined up before the grant and completed within days of it arriving. The price is below market value, typically 15 to 30 percent below for a buying company like us, in exchange for no agent's fee, no public viewings, no clearance and no risk of the sale falling through. It suits an estate that is paying to hold an empty flat, beneficiaries who want a clean end to the process, or a flat whose condition or lease would make the other routes slow. Our page on buying probate flats explains how we work with executors, and the quick-sale company mistakes guide explains how to check any cash buying company before you deal with it.
Whichever route you choose, write down why. Executors who can show they considered the alternatives, took the running costs into account and had the beneficiaries' agreement are well protected if anyone questions the decision later.
Related Reading
The probate process guide sets out the sale from start to finish, the probate mistakes guide covers the traps executors fall into, and the probate page explains how we buy probate flats.
Further FAQs
The estate is dealt with under the intestacy rules, and the person entitled to apply (usually the spouse or civil partner, then the children) applies for letters of administration instead of a grant of probate. The sale works the same way: it cannot complete until the grant is issued. The main difference is who can apply, and that the flat passes under the fixed intestacy rules rather than a will.
Gov.uk has a tool that shows who inherits when there is no will. Where the family cannot agree who should apply, take legal advice before anyone starts the application.
Not on their own. Every executor named on the grant must sign the contract and the transfer, so the sale needs all of them to agree. An executor who does not want to be involved can step back before the grant is issued, either by renouncing (giving up the role for good) or by having power reserved (standing aside while the others act). Both need a form at the probate stage, so decide early.
Where executors disagree about the sale, the usual answer is a frank conversation and a written record of the reasons for the decision. A court application to remove an executor is possible but slow and expensive.
An executor cannot buy estate property for themselves unless the will allows it, every beneficiary agrees or the court approves. This is the self-dealing rule, and a sale that breaks it can be set aside later. A sale to a family member who is not an executor is allowed, but the executors still have a duty to get the best price reasonably obtainable, so a sale below market value needs the beneficiaries' written agreement and usually an independent valuation.
Where a beneficiary wants to keep the flat, the simpler route is often for the executors to transfer it to them (an assent) rather than sell it.
Not if you sell to a cash buying company like us: we buy flats with the contents left in place and clear them ourselves. For an estate agency sale, agents usually want the flat cleared and cleaned before photographs, because an empty, tidy flat photographs better and buyers find it easier to picture themselves in it.
Either way, go through the flat for documents first. The lease, any share certificate for a management company, insurance papers and service charge statements are easy to throw out with everything else, and replacing them costs time and money.
The mortgage does not die with the borrower. Interest carries on, and the loan is repaid from the sale proceeds on completion. Tell the lender about the death as soon as you can. Most lenders will give the estate time to sell before they expect repayment, and many pause formal action for a period, but the interest still accrues and the estate owes it.
If the estate cannot cover the monthly payments in the meantime, ask the lender what it will accept. A written arrangement is better than missed payments, which can lead to arrears charges and, in the worst case, repossession proceedings.
Yes, provided they can justify it. Executors must get the best price reasonably obtainable, and that is not the same as the highest number anyone has mentioned. A certain sale at a lower price can be the better outcome for an estate that is paying service charges, insurance and a mortgage every month, or where a higher offer depends on a buyer who may not wait for probate.
Record the reasoning: the offers received, the running costs of the delay, the risk of a sale falling through and the beneficiaries' views. If the beneficiaries agree in writing, the executors are well protected. Our cash buyer Top 10 sets out what a cash offer usually looks like and how to check the buyer is genuine.