UK question on a will - Intent?

Wills dont deal with intent, they deal with whats written

So the solicitor is most likely correct (He would know better than me)

If the house he refers to aint his then most likely the will aint valid (he cant order the sale of something that dont belong to him)

Most likely the will will be declared invalid and he will have died instestate

Who gets what will depend on the value of whatever he left(including his house)

(if your mother wasnt married to him (or in a civil partnership) then she will get nothing

If he had a wife whe will inherit most (if not all) unless they were divorced

Otherwise it will all be divided equally between his children

(However I notice YOU dont refer to him as your father but as your mothers partner

This implies that he was not your biological father (even though he refers to you as son and daughter unless he adopted you then you aint his legal son and daughter)

(this could further complicate matters cos he does not refer to you by name, but as "son" and daughter" . But if he aint your biological father and he didnt adopt you - you aint HIS son and daughter)

If this IS the case then you will not inherit anything unless you can show you were his dependents

So its quite possible than under the rules of intestacy neither your mother, nor you, nor your sibling will inherit anything. and it COULD go to some distant relative or the state

This is why is SO important to make sure a will is drawn up correctly when leaving things to other people not "legally" your family

(sad cos its too late now - he REALLY ought to have the solicitor who arranged the sale/purchase of the houses check his will at the same time)

The Will is valid even though the testator's address has changed. It is the identification of the testator (person who wrote it) that matters. It is very common for an old address to be written on a will (as in "I Fred Bloggs of 16 Acacia Gardens to bequeath...")

If the will simply says "my house goes to ..." without actually specifying the addess then there is no problem. The current house can be sold and the prodceeds distributed.

The problem comes if the Will specifies the sale of (old address). You would have to establish that this now means (new address). That will involve Land Registry search to verify that he has moved, and may affect the Probate. There will have to be due legal process to establish that the sale of the new house is in conformance with the testator's wishes. This seems ironic and complex, and it can take a VERY LONG time (up to a year). But you must be patient, it is all to prevent any fraud or fake claims on the estate.

The HMRC will also be anxious for this to be sorted out because they may be entiltled to a tax cut from the estate too.

All legal costs will be deducted from the estate before it's distributed so you should not have to worry about that.

If your solicitor is saying that the Will is invalid then either he does not understand the process or he is not explaining it very well. Either ask him for a better explanation - and listen to it very carefully - or get another solicitor who specialises in Wills and Probate and who knows how to "de-mysitfy" the process for the client (you).

It does still stand. However, the will is quite specific as to which property is involved. As the deceased no longer owned it at the time of his death, the gift has lapsed and the solicitor is right. Which is pretty much what previous answerers are saying in a more convoluted way. The law expects that if he expected this clause to apply to whatever property he owned at the time of his death, he should have said so. Therefore his new home falls into residue - read on for what that means.

The law will not infer intent, as it is now impossible to question the deceased as to what he actually intended. It can only go on what he literally wrote. The way for a testator to deal with this is to instead of referring to a specific address, write something like "the property I own and am living in at the time of my death". But of course he didn't do that. The usual problem with home-made wills is that they aren't specific enough, but this one has the opposite problem - it is TOO specific!

How does the will divide up everything else that isn't specifically given to someone? This is called the residue, and on a literal reading, the property he moved to is part of the residue. If the will doesn't deal with the residue, we have a partial intestacy (part of the estate is not dealt with by the will) and this really does need a solicitor to deal with it. In which case your mother gets nothing from the residue as they weren't married and his biological children share the residue. But if it does deal with the residue, this new home is part of that.