Completely confused by legal house moving questions!

YoJoJo

I am currently going through a house move and the my solicitors have sent me some questions they have received from my Buyer's solicitor. Can anyone decipher the following for me, as I have no idea what they mean?!

Please specifically confirm whether there are any matters which are either:

a) unregistered interest which override first registration under Schedule 1 of the Land Registration Act 2002 and/or

b) unregistered interest which override registered dispositions under Schedule 3 of the Land Registration Act 2002

Another question asked, which i don't really get is:

Please confirm how the Existing Lender(s) will be discharging their Charge(s). We are just porting our existing mortgage over to the new property and increasing it slightly as we are moving to a bigger place.

If anyone has any advice, I would really appreciate it. Otherwise I have to ring my solicitor who talks really slowly as if she has no idea who I am or what is going on and so is reading my 'file' as she speaks to me over the phone.

Richard_Webster

This solicitor needs teaching a lesson.

So often a seller's solicitor will simply send the queries raised by the buyer's solicitors to their seller client without any explanation. This either results in confusion, as in this case, or leads the seller innocently to do something really silly which a solicitor should have warned him not to do e.g. call the building inspector in to get a regularisation certificate for some works done many yaers ago with consequent delay to everyone and cost to the seller.

The first questions about overriding interests relate to other people's rights that at the moment do not have to be registered at the Land Registry e.g. short term tenancies, but also all the weird and wonderful things such as liability to pay for the repair the chancel of a local church, to repair a sea wall, or to have a market held on your land. Most solicitors would send you a list of these things and ask you to confirm you didn't know about any of them.

The point about discharging the mortgage the solicitor should not even have asked you about, because it looks as if it is about whether your lender uses paper or electronic means to effect the discharge at the Land Registry after the mortgage has been paid off - and how on earth are you supposed to know that? (Even if you are porting your mortgage your solicitor will normally pay the lender back the whole amount owed on the old mortgage, having received a full amount for the new mortgage on the property you are buying - porting just means that the interest rate etc will be the same on the new one.)

So I would be inclined to write a letter back asking your solicitor to explain the points in plain English because that is what you are paying her for!

YoJoJo

Hi Richard

Many thanks for your response. I now feel that I can go back to my solicitor and demand some answers/information and hopefully not be fobbed off. I have decided to email them tonight with my queries & issues and tell them I will be following it up with a phone call tomorrow lunchtime. I need to strike while the iron is hot!

Other doubts about my Solicitor are starting to creep in. Our Buyers solicitors are asking for buildings insurance documents (we are a flat in a buildiung that has shared freehold), which we believed we had already supplied via our Solicitor. Our Solicitor obviously just posted the dundle of papers off to them without checking they were what was required. I also emailed my solicitor a week ago. No reply. I forwarded the same email to an alternative address 2 days later. No reply. I had to call them a few days later and was told my email had 'gone round the houses' but was given no actual reason or apology for lack of response. I am getting seriously stressed with them at this point and would love to have a face-to-face but their business hours are my business hours (like most people I expect).