You can "want to keep it," and you can "want to sell it." It seems the nuance is significant. "Want to keep it" means you will KEEP the land "in the family," as some families own land for generations, and USE it in some way, if only to gaze upon in admiration. When my aunt willed the small piece of land in question to my brother, it wasn't for him to act as a real estate agent to sell the property, but that he might treat it as something with ongoing value as a piece of land and without being converted into money. By selling it as quickly as he did, he clearly "wanted to sell it", as opposed to "wanted to keep it" as suggested by the Will.
I think my aunt's intent was that if my brother didn't want the land, that it should be sold and the proceeds divided among the nieces and nephews (who are my siblings), which is how she divided everything else up, according to her "share and share alike" philosophy which appears directly in her Will.
Why did she add the extra language regarding "if he wants it" or that it should be sold "by the executors" if she wanted my brother to just have the land outright? She didn't add this extra language to other "large" items she willed to my other siblings, just the parcel of land. She willed an old car to another brother, but without the extra legalese, the same for "household furnishings" she willed my 2 sisters (what one might find in the apartment of an 82 year old woman). But she added the extra language regarding "if he doesn't want it" to the land. Why? The Will is carefully typed out and appears to have been written by a lawyer, so all the language in the Will should be considered legitimate and proper.
If my brother had used the land in some way, for a few years, then sold it, that would be different - but this would be basically impossible since he lives in California and so probably put the land on the market immediately upon receiving it, as one might expect him to do since the land in question is forested and the area very rural and not near any major cities - my brother and his family are successful LA suburbanites and the tiny piece of forested land in question, in the Pa countryside, would be of no interest to him whatsoever, nor even if he lived within a few miles of the parcel of land. So his intent to sell the land, and to sell it right away, can be surmised, and can easily be interpreted to mean that he "didn't want it" despite the fact that he went through the legal process of putting it in his name first. Certainly it can be said that if he was given a choice of "do you want the land or do you want its cash value" he would have chosen the cash value, which means, again, that he "didn't want the land" in the way that my deceased aunt intended, about which I have no doubts.
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