Restrictive Covenant with non-existing company

tacotaco

Thinking of buying a house which, on the register of title, lists a 1951 restrictive covenant between a certain company (the owner at the time) and the purchaser (including all future purchasers), stating that any building or extension cannot be erected without written approval from this company. Googling the name of this company results in 0 relevant hits. How could we get permission to build an extension from a non-existent company? How does one determine the successors of this company?

G_M

You would have tofindout if the company was sold, went bankrupt or what. Who enherited the RC. Only they could enforce.

It may well be that
a) there is no longer any company in existance that could enforce the RC or
b) whoever inheritedmay have knowledge, or interest, in the RC and enforcing it.

Or not!

Hailstorm

Companies House can tell you what happened to the company. If the went out of business there would be nobody left who could enforce the covenant. If they had been taken over then the company that bought them out would have the right to enforce it.

tacotaco

Thanks Hailstorm and G_M,

I have used Companies House WebCHeck to search for current, dissolved, and previous names but found no company with the exact or similar name in the list. This is strange, because the company name listed in the title charges register is "The XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX Company Limited" (my Xs), implying it was registered as a limited company.

It is quite a long company name, so I have searched with several variations without "The", "Limited", and/or without "Company", and even several arrangements of just a keyword or two selected from the long name but no matches that seem remotely likely.

I've just found this company listed on title of a house 3 streets away as the seller to a developer in 1937 (and the developer is still in operation, so I'll contact them). Of interest, the RC in '37 is considerably less restrictive. For example, they can make structural modifications without written permission, don't have to ensure extensions are 50 feet back from the middle of the street, and are not required to have a 4-6 foot fence around the property of a particular design, and additionally a shorter, even more useless fence around the forecourt.

Many of the neighboring properties to the house I am interested in have no fences at the front of their properties, so I will have to chat with them. They've either got permission or are ignoring the RC.

Slinky

Have other properties in the street already been extended? Would they have been built by the same builder? If other properties have been extended it would seem likely that there's nobody interested in enforcing the covenant.