HMLR reevaluation

Lovelyjoolz

Hi All,
Happy New Year to you all! Hope you had a fabulous Christmas break.

I recently moved house (10th Dec) and just before Christmas we had a letter from the Land Registry to tell us that they will be visiting this week to reevaluate the house. Apparently, they are legally allowed to do this when a house changes hands, presumably to check how the property has been modified since it was last sold.

The property is a bungalow, in a road that consists mostly of typical 1930's semi-detached houses. The semi across the street from us has a dormer in the roof, so I presume they've fitted out a fourth bedroom up there. Their house is banded E. My bungalow is banded F. I don't know if that is a typical thing - bungalows being higher banded than houses - but they must have more sq ft over three floors than we do.

My main concern is if the council taxis going up. If they decide to reband us do we have the right to appeal?

Thanks for any advice guys

jimmo

I hope you’re not being scammed here.
Who is HMLR?
The Land Registry (UKLRS) don’t do valuations. The keep documents.
http://www.landregistryservices.com/?gclid=CLOf_ce9tq0CFVQLfAod0AOzmA
The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) (part of HMRC) do valuations.
http://www.voa.gov.uk/corporate/index.html

lincroft1710

Detached bungalows will be worth a lot more than semi detached houses of a similar size. You should look for other similar size bungalows if you want to compare CT bands.

agrinnall

jimmo wrote: »

I hope you’re not being scammed here.
Who is HMLR?
The Land Registry (UKLRS) don’t do valuations. The keep documents.
http://www.landregistryservices.com/?gclid=CLOf_ce9tq0CFVQLfAod0AOzmA
The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) (part of HMRC) do valuations.
http://www.voa.gov.uk/corporate/index.html

Actually, the Land Registry does appear to be known as Her Majesty's Land Registry or HMLR (for instance, see the heading of this document). But I agree, it does sound dodgy, I would also expect any letter to have come from the VOA.

jimmo

That was a bit of a poor link to the Land Registry in post #2, being a commercial site.
Here is one to the Land Registry.
http://www.landreg.gov.uk/

agrinnall wrote: »

Actually, the Land Registry does appear to be known as Her Majesty's Land Registry or HMLR (for instance, see the heading of this document). But I agree, it does sound dodgy, I would also expect any letter to have come from the VOA.

Yes but the document in the link, being a 10 year plan, is almost certainly more than 10 years old.
Before 2005 I worked for the Inland Revenue, then IR became HMRC.
We had stopped using (pre-printed) headed letter paper well before then and when the IR became HMRC the Word Templates which included the IR headings were replaced on the computer system virtually overnight. So on the first day we were all issuing letters from HMRC. There were no stockpiles of old headed paper to use up.

Lovelyjoolz

Thanks for the replies guys. No scam - HM Land Registry does appear to be refering to itself as HMLR nowadays. The letter was from them but the woman who arrived was from the Valuation Agency (all the proper i.d. etc etc).

Anyway, it looks like HMLR bungled something, because her brief was that the bungalow had been altered since the last evaluation. But nothing has been done to the property since 2002 and, since all properties in Wales were revalued and rebanded for CT in 2006 there was nothing done that they didn't already know about anyway!

The one positive thing is that she thinks that we are possibly banded too high. The bungalow 2 doors down is literally more than twice the size of ours, with twice as much land, and they are in the same band as us. She said she would "see what she could do for us". Hopefully this doesn't mean that we will be rebanded upwards!!!