A safe place for the deeds

Vera

I need to find a safe place to store my house 'deeds'.
My solicitor doesn't want to be responsible for it any longer.
Can anyone help?

Paul_Varjak

Why not check to see if your property is registered with the land Registry? You can do so online at:

https://www.landregisteronline.gov.uk/servlet/TitleSearchServlet

If your property is registered, I do not think that safe storage of the deeds is strictly necessary, though you want to buy a small fireproof box - also handy for birth certificates, building society passbooks etc.

I think it is also possibloe to 'voluntarily' register your property but I do not know how much it costs. Give your local Land Registry a ring.

lazy_worker

The deeds to our house were stored by the building society during the course of the morgage. Once the morgage became settled they offered to continue to store them for the cost of £11.75 per year.
At premium renewal time I always wonder about alternative storage, fire proof box/safe is something i will cosider myself this year
lazy worker

Vera

THank you both of you it is so good to know that there are help at
hand out there.
Vera

dougk_2

A bit of a long shot but i used to store some important documents in the safe of the company I worked for - they were more than happy as they had loads of room as it was little used (as they take far less cash than they used to).

Personal fireproof safes are relatively cheap nowdays as the previous posters have said they can be used to store other things too - Passports, guarantees, cash, valuables etc.

Paul_Varjak

lazy_worker wrote:

The deeds to our house were stored by the building society during the course of the morgage. Once the morgage became settled they offered to continue to store them for the cost of £11.75 per year.
At premium renewal time I always wonder about alternative storage, fire proof box/safe is something i will cosider myself this year
lazy worker

If you failed to pay the final £1 of your mortgage, maybe they would have continued to store them for nothing!

System

Paul_Varjak wrote:

If you failed to pay the final £1 of your mortgage, maybe they would have continued to store them for nothing!

When the house was transfered to me, the solicitor who dealt with it offered to keep the deeds for free. He did give me a copy for my own personal use though. Thanks for the link of the site though, i found my house there. It gave me the exact date it was transfered to me.

Paul_Varjak

I think that may have happened in Vera's case too, Judi. But now they seem unable to store them any longer for her. Perhaps Vera's Solicitor has run out of storage space and, if her property is registered anyway it does seem unnecessary for a Solicitor to store the deeds as well.

Adamskii_2

My building society stored my deeds, and very considerately lost them. So when I came to sell my flat they weren't available, resulting in a 4 month delay, and the buyer consequently pulling out. Nice eh?

garysletters

If you have a mortgage, the mortgage company will store them usually, however, recently there has been a change in the whole scheme of land registry and deeds.
After recently remortgageing my house, I got a letter from the solicitors saying
"Following the passing of the Land Registration Act 2002, which was passed to facilitate Electronic Conveyancing, the land registry now stores the main title documents to your property electronically, as a direct consequence lending institutions have made a policy decision to reduce substantially the documents they require us to send them.
We have asked {my previous mortgage company} to send you direct any title deeds they currently hold for safe keeping."

This was sent mid Feburary, and I've not got anything yet. However, it does state that the land registry now keep the main documents on their computers.

When, if I do recieve my documents, I'll just stick them in my "important document" file.

I presume the Land registry will hold everything needed for future transactions.

On the other hand, I have just bought a property in Scotland, and the letter from my solicitor said
"The deed in your favour has been sent for registration in the Land register. when this writ is returned to us duly registered.......we shall place it with the balance of titles in our safe for safekeeping on your behalf where we shall hold the deeds to your order."

so in this case, the solicitors are keeping the deeds.

maybe the first solicitors just dont want to store my stuff!!! (Cheapskates) Mind you, i didnt pay them for the remortgage, it was a 'free legals' deal.

amateur_saver

We bought our own safe..... they are fairly cheap now, and we bolted it in to the floor. It's great.... I know by having them still in our possession that no one else is responsible for losing them.

I had all the original deeds to our house from 1909 - so there was no way I was going to trust anyone else with them !! :rotfl: