Expert guidance on probate property, Court of Protection, deputyship, and estate management.
When a probate file holds two opinions on the same property a quarter of a million pounds apart, the executor's problem is not arithmetic. It is evidence, and the standard HMRC applies is about process rather than the number.
Average grant times have fallen from nearly sixteen weeks to under five. The long wait quietly covered for unprepared properties. That cover has gone.
The OPG has recalibrated how closely it supervises deputies. General or Minimal scales the reporting and the fee. It leaves the duty to keep the protected party's property secure exactly where it was.
A bankruptcy order does not hand the trustee a property to manage. It hands them the property. What section 306 vesting actually transfers, and the liabilities that arrive with the title.
The order lands and the first real decision is the protected party's home. It is also the asset where the deputy's authority is narrowest and the protected party's own wishes weigh heaviest.
Every association carries a small amount of stock that does not fit the normal model: complicated histories, legal questions, sensitive endings. It is where the cost and the exposure concentrate, and where standard management is the wrong tool.
The brand that wins a probate or Court of Protection instruction is not always the business that turns up at the door. Where the liability and insurance sit when delivery runs through a franchise or subcontract chain, and what to ask before you instruct.
An empty property with an unknown number of keys in circulation is not secured, whatever the insurance schedule says. What a defensible security position looks like on a professionally held vacant property, and why the key count is the place to start.
An empty property in an insolvency estate is not a paused asset. The running costs, the council tax asymmetry between bankruptcy and liquidation, and the value that leaks out of the file while the process runs.
When a borrower stops paying and the file moves to recovery, the house sits in a gap nobody clearly owns. The recovery process is built to manage the debt, not the building.
AI is changing what counts as reasonable evidence on a property file. It is not changing who carries the judgement, or the liability. The difference matters for executors, deputies and the firms instructing them.
Four to twelve months sit between a deputyship application going in and the order coming back. The property does not wait.
A Court of Protection clearance turns up propane bottles and petrol cans at a property no storage provider will touch. 'Don't dispose of anything' is not a best interests decision when the law of hazardous waste says otherwise.
Some of the homes on a council's long-term empties list are empty because the owner will not act. Others are empty because nobody can act yet, and the enforcement toolkit has very little to say about the second kind.
Heir hunters, commissions, and a BBC fraud investigation. The unmanaged property side of the estate is where the image problem gets worse.
Under the Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949, the person controlling a vacant property must report substantial rodent activity. For probate estates, that person is the executor.
Empty probate property is the most exposed asset most executors will ever manage. The insurance, council tax and security positions, and what reasonable steps look like in 2026.
What happens when a contractor instructed on a probate property causes damage and walks away? The legal, regulatory and insurance position for executors, deputies, and the firms instructing them.
