Conveyancing solicitor experienced with live/work unit purchase - change of status?

Richard_Webster

No solicitor would be able to certify title to a lender on residential mortgage unless satisfied that the use had been legally changed.

Therefore the seller would have to sort it our before he sold.

hairybaboon20

Richard_Webster wrote: »

No solicitor would be able to certify title to a lender on residential mortgage unless satisfied that the use had been legally changed.

Therefore the seller would have to sort it our before he sold.

but that is assuming that the lender requires the property to be classified as residential only rather than live/work on the deeds. as lenders tend to have limits on the % work area of the property while granting a residential mortgage... if there is no defined work area then they shouldnt object to lending?

Richard_Webster

but that is assuming that the lender requires the property to be classified as residential only rather than live/work on the deeds. as lenders tend to have limits on the % work area of the property while granting a residential mortgage... if there is no defined work area then they shouldnt object to lending?

It is possible that a lender might accept a situation where the use is predominantly residential but mortgage offers these days tend to be standard form document and do not often spell out these details.

(It is often the case that the applicant has told the lender something non-standard about their position or about the property but this is not repeated in the offer along the lines of "we know about X and are still prepared to proceed....")

So a solicitor would have to put the point to the lender and that could result in withdrawal of an offer. If in this case they confirm they are happy, fine, but sometimes the message about the non-standard point gets lost in transmission through the different stages of a mortgage application - e.g. broker writes accompanying letter explaining it but they only scan in the application form that doesn't contain space for the point to be explained.

You have to understand that lenders are large bureaucratic organisations and those who deal with processing mortgage applications rarely have much legal knowledge and certainly wouldn't understand planning law. It is just not possible in practice for a buyer's solicitor to talk to anyone in the lender's office who understands this level of detail so what happens is we write a letter explaining the position as best we can and wait and see what happens - they generally refer it to their surveyor who might understand a little more and his reaction will be crucial - but if he comes up with something that we think is silly we can't do much about it as we can rarely talk to lender's surveyors.