About to exchange, half of garden owned by council

Fatboy40

I'll leave both of you to do that if you don't mind

Fire_Fox

The whole point of appointing a solicitor is so you have someone to check that all is present and correct with the deeds and that you don't end up spending tens of thousands of pounds on a house that actually doesn't belong to you (or in this case a garden). If you are going to let your wife override the solicitor I suggest you dispense with his services, bring home the file and let her crack on with the conveyancing.

DVardysShadow

Fatboy40 wrote: »

We're right on the verge of exchanging contract, tomorrow afternoon ! (25/2/2010), and our solicitor has just made us aware that half of the rear garden of the property is owned by the council and the current owners pay rent on it.

Now up until 45 minutes ago we were never informed of this.
A secondary school was knocked down about 8 years ago, and the land was used for housing, and the homes adjoining this land all bought a portion of it to extend their gardens but the people in the one we're buying chose to rent it instead (plonkers !).

So it wasn't in the HIP? Or you didn't get the opportunity to look?????

Well of course the HIP is a totally useless waste of time according to some. But it should have made this point clear weeks ago.

Richard_Webster

So it wasn't in the HIP? Or you didn't get the opportunity to look?????

Well of course the HIP is a totally useless waste of time according to some. But it should have made this point clear weeks ago.

True - the Land Registry Plan should have showed the real extent of the garden - but the average buyer doesn't look at the HIP so perhaps OP could be forgiven for this.

ginvzt

Well, it should be a good lesson to others that you should look through all the documents! I remember when we bought the house (before HIP), we both read all the documents to know what we where buying! And also, for the houses we considered buying later on, after HIP was introduced, we made sure we looked through HIP to check the plot, water charges, council tax, etc.

chappers

Just signing as your wife wants is the last thing you want to be doing.

You don't even have a difinitive answer from the council about how the rental works, let alone any option to buy or whether the council actually even own it.

You MUST get this sorted before exchanging, the unkowns that could crop up with this one and their implications don't bear thinking about and the susequent cost to yourself could be substantial.

Having said all that I doubt the lender will agree to the advance anyway, in the present state so exchanging would be out of the question anyway.

silvercar

If its not in the HIP, do you have the option of exchanging contracts and then sueing the HIP provider for getting it wrong?

anotherginger

sunshinetours wrote: »

The verbal agreement with the council seems the bit I woud be most concerned about. Isn't that highly unusual for a public body to have a verbal agreement??

Not really, it depends when the agreement was made. The council are just honouring what someone agreed to verbally in the past, although most defintely wouldn't be now!!

Fatboy40

Thought I'd give you all an update.

So, we went to the solicitors appointment, with myself in the frame of mind not to sign unless a miracle happens. Once I'd started to talk to the solicitor I realy warmed to her and began to appreciate what she's having to deal with and the skills she has.

The vendors solicitor it turns out is very green, and is making simple mistakes that our solicitor is having to deal with. Also our solicitor can't decide if our vendor is try to play a game with us, or if they are just thick as two short planks.

If it wasn't for the fact that another solicitor at the small local practice we're using worked on a house on this road before we would not be aware of any of this, as he raised the fact that he also had to deal with some land owned by the council. The plan from the Land Registry is so small in scale that there's no way you could see this and judge the size of the rear garden correctly.

Now the vendor and the EA have been decidely dodgy here, to the extent where if we had completed without being aware it would have certainly been a case of misrepresentation. The EA has a letter that mentions the council land, and the vendor ommited details of the land from various forms they completed, also the land was being rented under license so not verbal as they stated !. Now they've been rumbled the vendor is going to buy the land, for £4,000 (discounted due to paid rent), and the EA is going to help with the legal fees which has to be the surest sign ever that the EA know they were being underhand (apparently the owner of the EA was not aware of any of this and left it all to someone else, so is now trying to do the right thing).

The funny thing is that we chose to go with the legal practice that the vendors EA reccomended, purely to try and speed things along, but if we had used an out of town solicitors we'd have been stung by this due to a lack of local knowledge. I bet the EA regrets this now as all of this is bitting into their profit

[Deleted User]

Well that sounds like a great outcome all round! I hope that your stress levels return to normal soon!

It amazes me - as someone who very nearly became a solicitor - how a professional of quite some standing can go through such a rigourous education and training process and then still be incompetent. When you hear some of the horror stories on here about solicitors not noticing X and Y or being fraudulent generally you do start to question how they ever became solicitors, given how tough the process is to become one.