Is it possible to sell as seen...

dboswell

A 3 bed chalet on a 1/5 acre plot which is on (the edge) of a larger 3 acre plot which is considered family land, but there is no overall control by any one person or group.

It has been "passed down" or in other words left as is through 4 generations and there are a number of other dwellings/people on it with similar chalets.

Nothing has been registered at LR.

Access is via a public road.

Browntoa

Yes , but it will be reflected in the selling price

You need the legal authority to all it though , nobody in their right mind would buy a property without a seller proving ownership

Ozzuk

At a guess I'd say you'd either need to separate it out onto a new title, with various easements for access, water, electricity etc, or you'd need to create some kind of leasehold situation.

I've seen many cabins/chalets for sale on large estates where they use the leasehold approach, often very short - i.e. 20-50 year lease for similar amounts of money.

AdrianC

Part of the sale will involve registering the property with the Land Registry.
If that might prove troublesome and long-winded, then it's going to be easier to get that done first.

If you want to physically separate the land that's being sold from the land that's not being sold, then you can register and sell it as freehold.
If you want to physically separate it, but retain ultimate ownership of the land, then you can create a lease.
If you don't want to physically separate it at all, then you can create a lease for just the house, and legal access to the shared land.

That last has the potential to make you seriously wish that you'd chosen one of the other options...

AnotherJoe

I am sure it could be sold for cash, in the same way you could buy a car off some bloke in a pub who swears that red Audi outside is his though he hasn't got any paperwork.

No lender will though provide a mortage on a house where there is no proof of ownership and any cash buyer would IMO be barking mad to buy such a house, or at best a real hardened gambler buying for a knock down price.

dboswell

That is helpful. Just wondered if it was feasible and its does need more investigation.

We have been on that 1/5 acre for 40-years and have recent bills for all the main services. I don't think we have anything else to prove ownership with a LR document. However, if a notice was placed at the property for objection to ownership there is unlikely to be any raised - very sure of that.

We had thought about creating a freehold, but it could long winded.

Hadn't though of the leasehold route but will start to explore it. It sounds like a good option at the moment. I assume it would be best to create a lease for the 1/5 acre or just the house?

Yes we expect it will be cash buyers and we had factored that into our expected price as significantly lower than would otherwise be. The overall expected value is less than £60k and it would give a rental income of £4.8k on a long let.

davidmcn

Are there any title deeds? What's happened in relation to probate etc over the years - has the land been declared to be part of anybody's estate, had IHT paid on it etc?

AlexMac

If the chalet's a holiday home, presumably there are buyers out there who'll be happy with leasehold tenure. If they are buying as a permanent residence and especially if detached, they may be less happy with leasehold tenure as this is less common, albeit not unknown.

As you're probably going to have to consult a solicitor to sort the tenure, and presumably, to handle the sale, it may be worth asking about the relative costs of regularising the tenure as either leasehold or a freehold parcel. And while you're at it, and assuming you might wish to sell your own place sometime, maybe sorting the tenures on the whole plot?

Case in point; when our kids bought a semi-detatched Victorian house in a town on the Isle of Wight they found that in common with many Island properties, it was leasehold. Less satisfactorily, the lease was not specific to their house, and referred only to a larger field on which this house and many others had been built over 100 years ago. This may have been related to the fact that most Island properties only started being added to the land Registry from the 1980's.

Despite the fact that local buyers and their solicitors had bought and sold on the house many times since then, our kids' solicitor (with her fancy London ways) demanded that the tenure be regularised, and suggested they walk away if not. So- perhaps over cautiously - they got her to make it freehold; which took a few months and a few hundred quid. Luckily, it was a buyers' market, and their vendor just had to put up with the delay... although as the vendor was skint, the kids paid for their lawyer to sort it; the vendor's suggested solution was to use a local Island lawyer who would have ignored the problematic tenure!

So the message for you, is that probably, anything is sellable at a price, but that also, anything is fixable if you have a good lawyer who knows their stuff.

good luck!