A grant of probate does not put the farm in the successor's name. Land vests first in the personal representative for administration, and it reaches the beneficiary by a further instrument, the assent, which must itself be registered before the beneficiary is owner on the register. Estates that skip or defer this final step manufacture the title problems the next generation will pay to solve.
The assent and its registration
The assent is the personal representative's formal transfer of land to the person entitled under the will or intestacy. For registered land it is completed by registration in the Land Registry, converting the beneficiary from someone with rights against the estate into the registered owner; unregistered land follows its own conveyancing path and, in many transactions, triggers compulsory first registration. Burdens the will creates, rights of residence, support charges, travel into the registration and should be dealt with in the same application rather than left floating.
The deferred assent problem
Rural title archaeology is largely a museum of deferred assents: land farmed for decades by a son whose name never reached the folio, folios still showing an owner two generations dead, and sales stalled while grants de bonis non are extracted for estates everyone had forgotten were open. Each deferral compounds, because completing an old assent requires reconstructing an old administration, and the participants' memories and documents decay. The rule for current administrations is simple: the estate is not finished until the register matches the will.
Using the administration to clean title
An administration is also the cheapest moment the family will ever have to fix what generations ignored: rights of way to out-farms exercised but never granted, boundary discrepancies between fences and maps, wells and passages shared by custom, small plots never registered at all. The estate bears the cost once, the beneficiaries receive marketable title, and the alternative, leaving the defects for a future sale under time pressure, always costs more. A title review belongs on the administration checklist of every estate with land, which in this practice's country is nearly all of them.
This article is general information, not legal advice. For the full practice area, see Estate Administration, or contact the practice to discuss a matter in confidence.