Deed of Easement

loobylou066

Hi all,
Really hoping that someone can advise. We had an offer accepted on a property back in February. We sold our house & moved into rented at the end of March. At that point we changed to a different firm of solicitors for our purchase having been very unhappy with the solicitors we used for the sale.
There have been many hold ups along the way & here we are now in the middle of August still not having signed or exchanged contracts. It did seem that we were on course to sign contracts this week, but last week our vendor emailed us with a copy of a deed of easement which has been drawn up by the solicitors acting for the buyers of their neighbours property. Both properties were formally one title & they share an access road & a septic tank etc. they have said that the deed just formalises the informal agreement that has existed between the two properties for the last twelve years regarding sharing the costs of maintaining the shared access road & rights of way for both properties etc. However the deed mentions a release of rights & also contains a section of new rights. It is of course all in legal terminology & difficult for us to fully understand the implications. Our vendors have agreed to hold off on signing the deed until we are happy. Our solicitor is currently looking at it. Today the vendor emailed me & implied that the hold up on exchange was on our side, I implied that that once the new deed was signed & agreed that it would have to go to the Land Registry to be added to the register & that could take several weeks, Our vendor said that wasn't the case, he said once it was signed the sale could go ahead & there would be no hold up ? So my question is, who is right, does the new deed need to take effect before the sale can complete ?
with many thanks x

dc197

What does your solicitor say? It sounds like either you are out ofyour depth of your seller is out of his depth in discussing this important legal document directly. Have your respective solicitors do all the discussions.

loobylou066

We are waiting to hear back from our solicitor, & the solicitor for the other side just said that we should get our solicitor to explain, so we are stuck waiting. Yes I agree both sides are out of our depth as regards this document. I just wondered if anyone else here had had a similar experience & therefore a bit more knowledge of such things. Thanks for the reply.

davidmcn

Your vendor is right. Registration of the deed doesn't need to be completed, as long as the deed is signed and ready to go to the registers when you want to complete.

loobylou066

hi, many thanks for the reply, that is very good news !

Davesnave

We had a similar rectification deed thanks to some [STRIKE]!!!!-eyed[/STRIKE] agreements between our vendors and the neighbours which had never been formalised.

We still completed inside 12 weeks, so I'm sure the paperwork must have gone to the Land Registry afterwards, as above.

loobylou066

hi, thanks very much for that, this process has already been going on for 6 months !
I was dreading this issue dragging it out for even longer.

G_M

This won't help with the question of speed (though your vendor is right), but I executed a similar deed with my neighbour. See:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3793571

agrinnall

And I did something similar with my neighbour in Scotland, and it did take quite a long time, but we did it all before I put my house on the market so that it wouldn't hold anything up (although the house then took 10 months to sell anyway...).

XKC-Me

For a compromise, you can send it to the Land Registry and then get from them confirmation that the application has been received and there is nothing ahead of it in the queue for the property. Then, assuming the application is done correctly, it is guaranteed to be registered before your purchase is registered.

Deeds which need registering sometimes include a clause in them requiring the relevant party to send it to the Land Reg within a short period and deal with any application issues for (among other things) this reason.