If you’ve inherited a property, selling it can become an expensive, daunting task full of prolonged waiting and mounting costs. You're either stuck paying bills on an empty house for months with estate agents, or losing sleep over delays and uncertainties. Cash home buyers can offer a quicker resolution in just 7-14 days, bypassing traditional hassles and saving you money when you need it most.
In the first three months of 2026, 62,261 grants of probate were issued in England and Wales. The average wait from application to grant was five weeks. Not six months. Five weeks. Letters of administration took eleven weeks where there was no will, and around twenty weeks where there was one but no surviving executor. On 13 July 2026 the application fee rose from £300 to £526, a 75% increase in a single step. Meanwhile 23.7% of agreed house sales collapsed before completion in the first quarter of 2026, and 37.5% of those collapses were triggered by something a surveyor found. Which is precisely what an unmodernised inherited house delivers.
So the delay isn’t the Probate Registry any more. It’s the six months of estate agency that follows it.
You have three routes. Estate agents, who need 22 to 28 weeks after your grant arrives and carry a one-in-four failure rate. Auction, which charges £1,700 to £3,000 upfront whether the property sells or not. Or a cash buyer who completes in seven to fourteen days once the grant is in your hands. Property Saviour is that cash buyer, with a proceedable offer within 48 hours, a price promise that means no last-minute reductions, and £1,500 towards your legal fees.
This page tells you what each route actually costs. Including the inheritance tax some executors claw back from HMRC after selling below probate value, and don’t know they’re entitled to.
Probate takes around five weeks from application to grant for a straightforward digital application, according to Ministry of Justice figures for January to March 2026. That is the grant itself, not the whole estate. Getting to the point where you can apply means valuing assets, tracing accounts and completing inheritance tax forms, which typically adds four to twelve weeks on top.
Letters of administration run longer. Eleven weeks where there is no will. Around twenty weeks where there is a will but no surviving executor to act on it. Applications that get stopped for a missing document or a tax mismatch averaged 13.7 weeks in May 2026, and genuinely complex estates can run to a year.
The old advice about waiting six months is out of date. The backlog peaked at nearly sixteen weeks in late 2023, the Ministry of Justice threw staff at it, and it cleared. Around nine in ten applications are now submitted online, and online runs roughly four times faster than paper. If someone is still quoting you twenty weeks for a grant, they haven’t looked at the numbers since 2023.
Here is the honest sequence, from death to money in the bank:
Total with us: roughly three to four months from death. Total through an agent: nine to twelve months, assuming nothing goes wrong. One in four times, something goes wrong.
You can market an inherited house and accept an offer before probate is granted. You cannot legally complete until the grant is issued, because legal title remains with the deceased’s estate until then. GOV.UK advises against putting the property on the market before you hold the grant, and there is sense in that. A buyer who runs out of patience walks away, and you start again from nothing.
There are two genuine exceptions, and both matter.
If the house was owned as joint tenants, it passes automatically to the surviving owner by survivorship. No grant is needed for that property at all. Check the Land Registry title before you assume anything. Joint tenants and tenants in common look identical from the pavement and behave completely differently on death.
If the estate is small, typically under £5,000, or where the asset holder agrees to release funds without a grant, probate may not be required either.
Beyond those two situations, there are no shortcuts. Anyone telling you they can complete on a solely-owned probate property before the grant is either lying or doesn’t understand the law. We will value the house and issue a formal written offer before your grant arrives, so you know exactly what is coming and can plan around it. We simply cannot hand you the money until the Registry hands you the grant.
An empty inherited house costs most executors between £300 and £450 a month once probate is granted, and less than that during the exemption period beforehand. You will see cash buyers quoting £540 or more. Some of them are counting council tax you are not liable for.
Here is the realistic breakdown for a mid-value terraced or semi-detached property. Unoccupied property insurance, £30 to £70. Utilities kept ticking over to stop pipes freezing, £60 to £80. Garden and grounds, £60 to £90. Security checks and inspections your insurer will insist on, £50 to £100. Council tax, nothing at all until the Class F exemption expires, then the full bill, and that is where it hurts.
Add the one-off costs and the picture sharpens. House clearance runs £1,500 to £4,000. Pre-sale repairs to satisfy a buyer’s surveyor run £5,000 to £25,000 on a house last decorated in the nineties. And your own time, which nobody puts a figure on: the round trips, the days off, the Saturday afternoons in a cold house sorting through somebody else’s paperwork.
The monthly number isn’t what breaks executors. The duration is.
Nothing, at first. A Class F exemption means no council tax is payable from the date of death until probate is granted, and for a further six months after the grant, provided the property stays unoccupied and has not been sold or transferred to the beneficiaries. It can remain fully furnished. The exemption does not apply if somebody else lives there, or if the property was jointly owned and a surviving owner remains liable.
Then it stops. Not tapers. Stops.
The moment those six months expire, the full council tax bill lands on the estate, and this is where slow estates get caught badly. The long-term empty homes premium can add 100% of the bill, rising to 200% or 300% in some authorities, and up to four times the standard rate after ten years empty. It is triggered once a dwelling has been empty for one continuous year.
Read that again, because here is the trap. The clock on that year runs from the date the property first became empty. Not from the date your exemption ended. There is a separate twelve-month exception from the premium that runs from the date probate is granted, but if the estate took ten months to reach the grant you may find both protections expiring within weeks of one another.
Councils apply this differently, and many offer discretionary relief where the property is genuinely being marketed. Ask them. Get the answer in writing, and get it early.
Probably not, and not for long. Most standard home insurance policies carry a vacancy clause that restricts or voids cover once a property has been unoccupied for 30 to 60 days. Some insurers drop back to fire, lightning, explosion and aircraft damage only. Others void the policy outright. Most allow around 30 days’ grace to notify them of the death, and that grace period starts running whether you know about it or not.
As executor you have a legal duty to protect the estate’s assets. If the house floods in February because nobody rang the insurer in November, that is a conversation you will be having with your co-beneficiaries, and possibly with a solicitor.
Telephone the insurer the same week you register the death. Ask three questions. How long will you cover an unoccupied property. What perils drop away. What conditions apply.
The conditions are the part people miss. Most unoccupied policies require the water drained down, the heating held at a minimum temperature over winter, letterboxes sealed, and documented inspections every seven, fourteen or thirty days. Miss an inspection and a claim can be refused, even if the inspection would have changed nothing. Specialist unoccupied cover typically runs in three, six or twelve month terms and costs £30 to £70 a month. It is the one holding cost you genuinely cannot skip.
You pay capital gains tax only on the increase in value between the date-of-death valuation and the sale price. Not on the whole value of the house. Inheriting a property is not itself a taxable event, and the probate value becomes your base cost.
Sell close to probate value and there is usually nothing to pay. Sell two years later into a rising market and you have a gain.
For 2026 to 2027, the annual exempt amount is £3,000. Residential property is taxed at 18% for basic rate taxpayers and 24% for higher rate. Personal representatives selling in the estate’s name pay the 24% rate regardless of anyone’s personal income. Any tax due must be reported and paid within 60 days of completion. That deadline catches people out constantly, because it runs from completion, not from the end of the tax year.
There is a further trap that only bites slow estates. Personal representatives get the annual exempt amount in the tax year of death and the two tax years following. After that, nothing. An estate that drags into a fourth tax year pays 24% on every single pound of gain from the first.
The flipside is worth knowing too. If you sell below probate value, the estate makes a capital loss, and an estate’s capital loss is usually worthless, because there is rarely another gain to set it against. Which brings us to the section almost nobody writes about.
There is no easier way to sell a house today.
Yes. Where the estate has paid inheritance tax and the personal representatives sell the property within four years of death for less than the probate value, they can claim relief under section 191 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984 using form IHT38. The lower sale price is substituted for the date-of-death value, and HMRC refunds the inheritance tax overpaid on the difference. At 40%.
Solicitors know about this. Estate agents rarely mention it, because it only becomes relevant once the sale price comes in below the valuation somebody optimistically supplied at the start.
Here is what it looks like in pounds, using the same £180,000 example as our offer breakdown further down this page.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Probate value declared to HMRC | £180,000 |
| Cash offer at 70% | £126,000 |
| Reduction in the estate’s taxable value | £54,000 |
| Inheritance tax refunded at 40% | £21,600 |
| Effective position for the beneficiaries | £147,600 |
On a taxable estate, a 70% offer lands nearer 82% once the relief has been claimed. That £21,600 goes back into the estate and is distributed alongside the sale proceeds, per the will.
Now the honest part, because we are not going to oversell something this useful:
If your estate is taxable, ask your probate solicitor to review the IHT38 position before you accept any offer. Ours included. We would rather you went into this knowing the full picture than discovered it eighteen months later.
It depends entirely on whether the property will sell for more or less than its probate value. Get it the wrong way round and it costs real money.
If the house will sell for more than probate value, appropriating it to the beneficiaries before the sale is usually right. A deed of appropriation transfers the beneficial interest without moving legal title, and the personal representatives keep control of the sale as bare trustees. Each beneficiary then uses their own £3,000 annual exempt amount, and basic rate taxpayers pay 18% rather than the 24% personal representatives pay. Three siblings means three allowances rather than one.
If the house will sell for less than probate value and the estate has paid inheritance tax, do the opposite. Appropriate the property, and you have handed the sale to the beneficiaries, who are not the appropriate person for a section 191 claim. The relief vanishes. You have traded a possible £21,600 refund for a capital loss that nobody can use.
The decision needs making before you accept an offer, not after. We are property buyers, not tax advisers, and we would sooner you took proper advice than took ours.
If executors cannot agree, the sale cannot proceed. Every executor must sign the contract and the transfer. One holdout stops everything, and there is no majority vote to overrule them.
The formal remedy is an application to court to remove or substitute an executor. It costs £5,000 to £15,000 in legal fees, takes four to six months, and by the end of it the family relationship is usually beyond repair.
What actually causes the deadlock is rarely the price. It is the difference between three people who need the money at three different speeds. One sibling has a mortgage renewal coming. One has no financial pressure and wants to hold for a better market. One cannot face the idea of the house being sold at all, and dresses that up as a view on valuation.
The property keeps costing money throughout. Roofs leak in January and nobody wants to fund the repair out of their own share. A £4,500 job becomes an £8,000 job over six weeks of argument. Then the argument is about who caused the delay.
A guaranteed, fixed, written offer with a completion date ends the argument, because there is nothing left to disagree about. Everyone can see the number. Everyone can see the date. The money is distributed exactly as the will instructs and the family gets to go back to being a family.
Estate agents struggle with inherited property because the two things that make an inherited house hard to sell, dated condition and a remote seller, are the two things that most often collapse a sale.
Survey findings caused 37.5% of all UK fall-throughs in the first quarter of 2026. Buyers changing their minds caused 31.25%. An inherited house is exactly the property that produces both. Original wiring, a boiler past its service life, no damp course certificate, a kitchen from 1985. The surveyor writes it all down. The buyer’s lender reads it. The renegotiation starts.
Then it lands on you. You are 200 miles away, in a job, being asked to get three quotes from builders in a town you do not live in, for a house you have never owned. Meanwhile 38% of fall-throughs happen within the first four weeks of a sale being agreed, so the collapse you fear most tends to arrive before you have properly relaxed.
None of that is the agent’s fault. It is simply what happens when you put a dated, empty, motivated-seller property into a chain and hope. Agents work at market pace. Market pace in 2026 is 22 to 28 weeks from listing to completion, and one time in four it produces nothing at all.
Auction suits inherited property in two situations. Where the title is genuinely defective, and where the property is so unusual that no open market comparable exists. Outside those two, it is an expensive way to reach the same buyers who would have bid privately.
The costs come first and do not come back. Entry fees of £800 to £1,500. Legal pack preparation, £600 to £900. Catalogue and marketing, £300 to £600. That is £1,700 to £3,000 paid upfront, whether the reserve is met or not.
Auction rooms also read your paperwork. The words “executor sale” in a catalogue description are a signal, and the professionals in the room price accordingly. Guide price £200,000, bidding opens at £110,000, stalls at £125,000, reserve was £160,000. Unsold. You are now £2,200 lighter, ten weeks further on, and back at the start.
If it does sell, completion typically runs 20 to 28 days after the hammer, which is slower than a direct cash sale and no more certain until the deposit is actually paid.
You sell an inherited house fast by preparing everything you can before the grant arrives, then completing with a cash buyer in seven to fourteen days once it does.
The preparation is what creates the speed, and most of it can happen while you are waiting.
Obtain a proper date-of-death valuation, because it sets your base cost for capital gains tax and your starting point for any inheritance tax claim. Get the buildings insurance switched to unoccupied cover. Instruct a conveyancer early and get the identity checks and money laundering paperwork out of the way. Locate the title, the deeds, any guarantees for the boiler or the roof, and the gas and electrical certificates if they exist. Agree in writing with your co-beneficiaries who speaks to the buyer, what the floor price is, and who signs what.
Do all that, and the seven to fourteen days after your grant arrives is genuinely seven to fourteen days. Skip it, and the grant lands on an unprepared estate and you lose the month you spent waiting for it.
Send us photographs today and we will issue a formal written offer within 48 hours. No survey. No viewings you have to attend. We contribute at least £1,500 towards your legal fees, and our Price Promise means the figure we offer is the figure we complete on.
Search Companies House before you accept any offer, and read the charges register. It takes four minutes and it tells you almost everything you need to know.
Type the company name exactly as it appears on their letterhead. Look at the charges section. Multiple charges registered against a company mean it is borrowing to fund purchases. That is not cash buying, it is debt-funded speculation, and it means the completion date they have promised you depends on somebody else’s lending decision.
Then check three more things. Incorporation date, because a company registered eight months ago has not completed hundreds of probate purchases whatever the website says. Filed accounts, because a company with the resources to buy your house has the resources to file on time. And redress scheme membership, because any genuine buyer will belong to The Property Ombudsman or the Property Redress Scheme, and will give you the membership number without being asked twice.
If a company will not give you its registered number, walk away. If it becomes defensive when you say you are going to check, walk away faster. Legitimate buyers expect the question.
We have been trading for over fifteen years. We buy in the name of Collingtree Limited. We are regulated by The Property Ombudsman under membership number T13839 and registered with the ICO under ZC093013. Go and look at all of it before you speak to us.
| Method of sale | Value achieved | Fees | Timeframe | Is sale guaranteed? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Estate agents | 90–95% | 1–5% | 3–6 months | No – one in three sales collapse |
| Auctioneers | 70–80% | 2% plus | 2–3 months | No – half of properties don’t sell |
| Property Saviour | 70–80% | £0 | 10–28 days | Yes – 99% success rate |
Our offer is 70% of realistic market value because that is what the arithmetic of buying, refurbishing and reselling a dated property actually leaves. Here is the whole calculation on a house with a realistic market value of £180,000.
| Cost Category | Percentage | Amount on £180k | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your Payment | 70% | £126,000 | Immediate cash to all beneficiaries |
| Legal Costs | 2% | £3,600 | Conveyancing, both sides |
| Holding Costs | 3% | £5,400 | Council tax, insurance, utilities, security |
| Stamp Duty | 5% | £9,000 | Government tax we must pay |
| Resale Costs | 5% | £9,000 | Agents, builders, solicitors after the work |
| Gross Profit | 15% | £27,000 | Before corporation tax |
That is £126,000 in your hands seven to fourteen days after your grant arrives, with contents included and nothing for you to clear.
Compare it honestly. Through an agent, the same house might achieve £171,000 after a survey-led renegotiation. Deduct 1.5% commission and five months of holding costs and you net around £162,000, five to six months later, with a one-in-four chance of the whole thing collapsing first.
The gap is about £36,000. If your estate paid inheritance tax and you claim the section 191 relief, that gap narrows by up to £21,600.
Some executors will still take the £36,000 and the six months. That is a perfectly rational choice and we will tell you so. Others want it finished, want it certain, and want the family talking to each other at Christmas. That is also rational. We are only interested in the second group.
Every figure in this table is defensible and we will walk you through any of them on the telephone:
| Method of sale | Value achieved | Fees | Timeframe | Sale guaranteed? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Estate agents | 90-95% | 1-5% | 22-28 weeks | No. Around one in four collapse |
| Auctioneers | 70-80% | £1,700-£3,000 upfront | 8-12 weeks | No. Reserve often not met |
| Property Saviour | 70-80% | £0 | 7-14 days | Yes. 99% completion rate |
We buy inherited houses with the contents left in place. You take what matters, meaning photographs, jewellery, documents and the things you would regret losing, and we handle everything else.
Professional clearance costs £1,500 to £4,000 depending on volume, and doing it yourself costs more than people expect once you have priced the skips, the fuel, the charity shop runs and the weekends. On a house 200 miles away it can absorb a month of your life.
There is no requirement to tidy, empty or present the property for us. The loft can stay full. The garage can stay full. We have bought houses in every condition there is and we do not price on presentation, we price on the finished value once the work is done.
Keep it only if one of three things is true. Somebody wants to live in it now and can afford the running costs. It is already tenanted and generating positive cash flow after tax. Or every beneficiary genuinely agrees to keep it and every beneficiary can fund their share of the maintenance indefinitely.
If none of those is true, the house is not an asset. It is a monthly bill with a roof on it.
Be particularly careful about “keeping it in the family” as a plan. It sounds respectful. It usually means one sibling manages the property, pays for the repairs, chases the tenant and resents the other two within eighteen months. The costs are real and recurring. The sentiment is real but it does not pay for a boiler.
An assisted sale is where we advance you cash immediately, market the property through our own network, cover every cost, and guarantee to buy it ourselves at an agreed price if it does not sell within eight weeks. If it sells for more than our cash offer, you keep the difference.
The cash advance stops the holding costs from the first week. The guarantee removes the risk. If it achieves more, you are better off than you would have been.
It works for inherited property in a decent area that needs cosmetic updating rather than structural work. It does not work where the property needs underpinning, where the location is genuinely difficult, or where you need the full amount immediately. We will tell you honestly which category yours falls into.
Request a call back and we will telephone you within two hours during business hours, and outside them if that suits you better.
Tell us where the property is, roughly what condition it is in, where you are with probate and what the beneficiaries need. Send photographs. We will issue a formal written offer within 48 hours. No survey. No viewings for you to attend, because we use Viewber. No fees. At least £1,500 towards your legal fees, and you use your own solicitor so you get independent advice throughout.
When the grant arrives, we complete in seven to fourteen days and the money goes out exactly as the will directs.
You did not choose this. Somebody died and left you a house, a set of legal duties and a monthly bill in a town you probably do not live in. The kindest thing anybody can do is give you a fixed number, a fixed date, and let you get on with your life.
Request your call back now. Grant of probate in hand? We can complete inside a fortnight.
Whether you’re facing a tricky sale, navigating probate, or simply looking to sell fast without hassle, you’re in the right place. Our blog is packed with practical advice, expert insights, and real-life tips to help homeowners, landlords, and executors across England, Scotland and Wales make informed decisions — whatever the condition of their property.
