Service charge dispute on estate

pinkdora1

Hi all, well our ongoing saga with our conveyance continues! Has been 11 weeks now.
On the new estate where we're buying there is an ongoing dispute between the whole estate and a maintenance company who were employed to maintain the gardens etc. Basically people were paying but nothing was being done. So the whole estate is in uproar. Our sellers have paid the maintenance fee until the end of 2013. Their solicitor has forwarded everything onto our solicitor to do with the service charge, but he's still not happy, saying our lender will not lend us the money if there is an ongoing dispute? I've looked at our full mortgage offer paperwork and it states nothing about this. The sellers solicitor can't see what the problem is and there are houses being bought and sold on the estate all the time!!
Can it be that this can stop us from completing?? Surely people wouldn't be allowed to put their houses up for sale if the dispute was going to cause an issue?
Any advice or expertise would be great, thank you

gld73

If the sellers have paid their fees as required, I can't see why this would prevent your purchase - you know the maintenance company isn't doing everything it should so you're going into it with your eyes open. When I bought a house on an estate which all residents had to pay a maintenance fee for (whether leasehold or freehold - I was the latter), the legal stuff in the purchase paperwork covered the possibility that the person I was buying from hadn't paid everything they owed (by way of a bond or something); as it turned out, the maintenance company did do a bigger back-dated bill than expected after I moved in, but I recovered this amount by contacting my solicitors. As my seller effectively owed the maintenance company money and I still managed to go ahead with the purchase, I'm not sure why your situation, where the seller seems to be all okay and it's just that the grounds on the estate aren't as tidy as they should be, would stop things??