Selling Your Parent's House With an LPA in England

Your parent needs residential care, their savings are running low, and the family home is the only asset large enough to cover the fees. You hold a registered Property and Financial Affairs LPA. Can you sell the house? Yes — but the process has legal requirements that trip up families who assume the LPA is a blank cheque.

Confirming Your Authority to Sell

A registered Property and Financial Affairs LPA gives attorneys the legal power to sell the donor's property, provided:

• The LPA is registered with the OPG (unregistered LPAs have no legal force)
• There are no restrictive instructions in Section 7 that prohibit or limit property sales
• The sale is clearly in the donor's best interests under the Mental Capacity Act 2005

Check the LPA's Section 7 carefully. If the donor wrote an instruction like "My attorneys must not sell my residential property," that instruction is legally binding — you cannot override it without applying to the Court of Protection for permission, which costs £432 in court fees and months of delay. Instructions that restrict property sales "unless care home fees require it" or "without first obtaining a professional valuation" are easier to work with, but you must follow them precisely.

Proving the LPA to HM Land Registry

Before a property sale can complete, you must provide HM Land Registry with evidence of your authority under the registered LPA as part of the property application. This is separate from the OPG registration.

The conveyancer will lodge the appropriate property application, usually Form AP1 for a registered-title transfer, with the LPA evidence. HM Land Registry may require the original or a sufficient certified copy of the registered LPA. For eligible applications made by a conveyancer, it can also accept a valid, colour summary sheet generated by the OPG's Use/View a Lasting Power of Attorney service; the access code itself is not the evidence lodged. If you only have one paper copy, ask the conveyancer which evidence route applies before sending it anywhere.

The conveyancer handling the sale will typically manage this evidence, but you should confirm it's provided early. If the required authority evidence isn't available by completion day, the sale cannot proceed — and a collapsed chain is expensive for everyone.

The Second Trustee Trap

This is the complication most families don't see coming. If the property is jointly owned — which is extremely common between spouses — a sole attorney or a sole deputy cannot give a valid receipt for the sale proceeds where a beneficial trust exists. This stems from the Trustee Act 1925.

Scenario: Your mother and father own the family home as joint tenants. Your father has lost capacity, and you hold his Property and Financial Affairs LPA. Your mother wants to sell the house to fund care. You might assume that you (acting for your father under the LPA) and your mother can simply execute the sale together.

The problem: Under Section 36(9) of the Trustee Act 1925, you need a "second trustee" to be appointed in place of the incapacitated co-owner to properly manage the transaction. The healthy co-owner and a sole attorney cannot, by themselves, give a valid receipt for the capital sale proceeds.

The fix: Apply to the Court of Protection using Form COP1 and Form COP1D (Annex D) to appoint a second trustee. Once the court issues the order, the second trustee and the continuing owner can execute the transfer (Form TR1) and receive the proceeds. This adds time and cost to the sale, but attempting to complete without it creates a title defect that buyers' solicitors will refuse to accept.

Pricing and Best Interests

Attorneys have a strict fiduciary duty to act in the donor's best interests. For property sales, this means:

Sell at fair market value. Get at least one professional valuation from an RICS-registered surveyor. Selling to a family member below market value — even with the best intentions — can be treated as a deprivation of assets by the local authority and may expose the attorney to an OPG investigation.

Keep proceeds in the donor's name. Sale proceeds must go into an account solely in your parent's name. Mixing proceeds with your own funds, or distributing them to family members, is a breach of fiduciary duty regardless of what the family agrees to.

Document the decision. Record why the sale is in your parent's best interests — for example, that care home fees are depleting savings and the property value is needed to fund ongoing care. The Mental Capacity Act requires attorneys to consider the donor's past wishes (did they express views about selling the home?) and to make the least restrictive decision available.

Timeline and Practical Steps

A property sale under an LPA follows the normal conveyancing timeline — typically 8 to 16 weeks from accepted offer to completion — with additional steps:

1. Confirm the LPA has no Section 7 restrictions on property sales
2. Provide the conveyancer with the registered LPA evidence HM Land Registry requires
3. If jointly owned, apply for a second trustee appointment from the Court of Protection (add 3-6 months)
4. Obtain a professional valuation
5. Instruct a conveyancer experienced in LPA property sales
6. Complete the sale and deposit proceeds in the donor's account

The England Lasting Power of Attorney & Deputyship Kit covers the entire property sale workflow, including the second trustee application process, a best-interests decision template for property disposals, and a pre-sale checklist that catches the Section 7 restrictions and Land Registry requirements before they become problems.

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