Probate genealogy and the reputation it can't quite shake

Let's not pretend the probate genealogy industry doesn't have an image problem.

Heir hunters charging twenty or thirty per cent of an estate to find beneficiaries who didn't know the deceased existed. Families discovering they're entitled to a share, but only after committing to the firm that found them. Documentary crews working the more photogenic cases. The Bona Vacantia unclaimed estates list itself taken offline last year after a BBC investigation found a crime gang had been using it to commit fraud, then quietly reinstated once a review concluded. The tabloid coverage isn't fabricated. There are around 5,700 unclaimed estates on the Bona Vacantia list at any given moment, estimated by Weightmans at roughly £1.6 billion collectively, and they're commercially attractive in ways the intestacy rules never intended.

What that narrative misses is that the work itself is genuinely hard. Reaching a final beneficiary in a complex intestacy can mean working with foreign registrars who answer on their own timetable and reading parish records in person, in archives the family left behind generations ago. The commission model exists because nobody else funds that work upfront. Most beneficiaries traced this way would never have known they were entitled to anything without the firm doing the tracing. The work matters.

What AI has changed, and what it hasn't

AI has changed the tracing side of the work. What used to take six to eighteen months can now be done in days. Records that lived in physical archives sit in queryable databases. Cross-referencing that depended on a researcher's memory for parish names happens at speed. The firms that have invested in this are operating on a faster clock than the firms that haven't, and the gap is widening.

What AI hasn't touched is the property side of the estate.

The house at the centre of most of these cases sits empty while the tracing runs. Empty while beneficiaries are identified, then asked to confirm their claim. Empty through the period of administration that follows. That's months in the best case, and often over a year where multiple beneficiaries have been traced by competing firms and the appointment of an administrator has to be argued out. Through all of that, the property has been at risk of insurance lapse, council tax escalation, weather damage, theft from contents, squatting, and quiet deterioration.

That risk is professional, not just physical. When a property loses cover halfway through a tracing exercise and something then happens to it, somebody downstream is going to be asked why. The genealogist who instructed the work doesn't usually have an answer. The solicitor who recommended the genealogist often doesn't either. The beneficiaries, who at this point have committed a meaningful share of their inheritance to a firm they didn't choose, ask the question that's hardest to answer: what was being done about the house while you were finding us?

The recommendation question

When a firm recommends a probate genealogist to a client, or builds a panel of them for repeat appointments, that recommendation carries professional liability. How carefully is it actually being interrogated?

The usual checks cover complaints history and PI cover, sometimes extending to whether the firm conducts itself against the Bona Vacantia Division's published guidance on research practice. What they rarely cover is what happens to the property during the tracing period. A beneficiary or regulator working backwards from a complaint will land on that question quickly, and most solicitors haven't asked it of the firms they recommend. The asymmetry matters because the recommendation is what the regulator works from, not the work itself.

Where Prospect fits

This is where Prospect PS sits in the picture, and we're explicit about the role. We're the property side of the estate while the genealogical work runs. Independent of any single beneficiary or genealogy firm. The record is logged from the first instruction, and every party with a stake in the eventual administration can see it.

In practical terms that means a property condition report within the working week of instruction. Insurance and council tax position verified at the same time, with the steps to bring both into compliance recommended and tracked. Key holding, utility management, scheduled inspections, and visit logs all run from the same case record through the period the estate is unresolved. Compliance reporting produced from the live record using AI, so any party with an interest can see what has been done and on whose instruction. A panel relationship operated to a structured fee schedule, with service levels written into the engagement. The kind of evidential record a solicitor can put in front of any party who asks, with the answer to "what happened to the property" already in writing.

This is a firmer set of commitments than the rest of the Prospect series usually leans into. We think this audience is asking for them.

The case for the better firms

The honest case for probate genealogy is that the work matters and the better firms do it to a real standard. Much of the criticism lands on firms you could separate from the better ones if anyone bothered to look. The harder question is whether enough solicitors are doing that looking when they recommend.

What separates the serious firms is a defensible record of how the property side of every estate they handle has been managed. That record is what makes the recommendation hold up if challenged, and what allows a solicitor to point to a process when a beneficiary asks why probate took fourteen months.

The regulatory horizon

The Law Commission's final report on Modernising Wills Law, published in May 2025, sets out the most substantial overhaul of the Wills Act 1837 in close to two centuries, with a draft Wills Bill attached. Once primary legislation is on the table for any part of succession law, the surrounding professional frameworks come under review as well. Standards for the firms operating in this space will be part of that conversation, whether the industry leads it or has it brought to them.

The genealogy firms that pair the tracing standard with a documented property handling standard will be the ones that come through this with their solicitor panels intact. We think that's where the regulatory line is going to land, and we're building the property side of that picture now.

I would be interested to hear from probate genealogists and solicitors on this. Whether you recognise the property gap from your own cases, or whether you have a framework that handles it better than what I have described here. You can find me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

At Prospect PS we manage the property side of intestate estates because the tracing work and the property work are two different disciplines, and treating them as one is where the risk accumulates.