Argh! why wait 23 years to sort....

madfrenchgirl

... the deeds out?


Honestly!

BF and I have been trying to buy a house for ages now, and we are so blase, we are not even looking forward to it.

We visited the house at the beginning of July, said we would offer full asking price for it provided we could move in very quickly (we already knew our "friends" landlords were chucking us out on bank holiday august).

offer got accepted, had to wait for the chain to do the loop. It is a 3 people chain (us, her and her daughter, and the lady they are buying from).

Chain got looped at the beginning of August.

Of course not enough time to complete, so we moved to campsite and then to BF's workmate's


everything is now in place for exchanging contracts, but guess what?

4 weeks ago the vendor's sollic noticed the deeds were still in the old lady and her husband's name.

seems normal you might think! but NO!

the husband died 23 years ago, so the deeds have to be changed and signed and certified by a judge in a court of law.

It has now been 4 weeks of us being patient and at the time it was spotted, we still had our searches and other bits going thru, but now that everything is ready, this is taking the mic.

Of course we are phoning our sollic and the EA every 2 days, and of course you get into the game of not here, could not contact, no update, only remind you of the same progress, blah blah... BUT nothing that we dont already know about.

Any ideas on how to solve this, or how long it honeslty takes for a sollic firm to arrange for a judge to sign a effing paper?

thx a lot for your input guys, I am just getting fed up with this.

I wanted to tell them we were forced to move, but BF reckons that we could lose the mortgage offer as the bank might get cold feet at our lack of stability. And guess what he has done, he told the EA that we had an extension and they are actually chucking us out in 2 weeks time, so cant revert back on that.

Rant over.

Debt_Free_Chick

It's not as simple as you seem to think.

Nowadays, title (ownership) to land or property is registered on the Land Registry database. But this system only came in where the land was sold or transferred since 2002 (? or thereabouts).

Before then, you had to be in possession of the deeds to prove you owned the property. And you had to prove you were the owner stated on the deeds. The deeds are formal legal documents that prove ownership of the property.

To change the names on the deeds, one needs to submit evidence that the previous owner is not the current owner and that the current owner is, indeed, entitled to own the property. It's not as simple as "changing a piece of paper". Think about it ... if it were that easy, then deeds could fall into the wrong hands or be stolen, change the name and bingo! Someone owns a property that they don't.

This process is to protect you as buyers. You will only own the property if those selling it are entitled to do so i.e. they must own it in the first place.

Courts & Judges are busy places/people. An appointment will need to be made with the Judge - you can't just knock on the door amd be seen there and then!

You will have to be patient.

As for your accommodation situation - could you not negotiate to stay where you are for a little while longer? No other friends or relatives to help? Have you looked for a holiday cottage that might take a booking for say a month?

Lots of options, but you need to consider them now and not leave it until the last minute.

HTH

madfrenchgirl

Hi debt-free,

thx for the concern and reply. I did not know about the 2002 land registry thing, no one bothered explaining it to us.

I just find it very ironic. We have had quite a lot of crap coming our way. Looks like providence is playing a trick on us. Why does such a stupid thing have to come our way?

We have moved in with a workmate of my BF's, we are not in the campsite anymore, but we dont want to be abusing charity either.

We could not negotiate to stay longer in the previous house, you would understand if you read my "going bonkers" thread, but to sum up: the house was infested with fleas, the noise from the road was driving me mad, and the landlady was a royal pain in the bum. We had to go by bank holiday August period.

The friends that could put us up were either on holiday or in DIY frenzy or living too far away at the time. We did not leave stuff until the last minute, we booked the campsite one month in advance.

TBH, the campsite was way more preferable than being in our previous house, that goes to show how bad it was. The most pain has been to move stuff into storage really.

Things are better now, we live with a very nice bloke. I just would like things to get sorted and finally go on holiday and think about other stuff. And maybe have the family around for xmas...