Solicitor Failed to Register All Titles Properly!

Coeus

Hello everyone,

Hope all is well.

In another chapter of solicitor incompetence it has come to light 3 years after purchase that the solicitor I used to purchase my house has failed to correct register the transfer of all titles with the land registry.

In short the sale was to transfer two items of property - house and seperate garage.

The house under one title has correctly been transferred.

The garage is still under the old owners name (checked on land registry today).

Very annoying :mad:

I have contacted the solicitor who completed the sale today and await an urgent response tomorrow.


Any thoughts on this please? Many thanks in advance!

Chanes

I would think it would just need the solicitor to have the title changed which he/she would do free of charge and it will all be OK?

Coeus

Hi Chanes!

I do hope so. Do the solicitor need the signature of the seller? It has been three years!

Many thanks for your reply.

Great people on this forum.

davidmcn

Coeus wrote: »

Do the solicitor need the signature of the seller?

Yes, but they may already have everything they need on file, just not sent it to be registered.

Coeus

Here's hoping davidmcn!

rtho782

A friend of mine had a similar issue on a house he was buying a few years back, the garage was not in the name of the sellers, but the previous owners.

It delayed the sale about 9 months as the vendor had to contact the previous vendors and get them to sign the garage over, and the previous vendors had since divorced and one was untraceable for months, the other wanted money to sign.

It all got resolved in the end but cost the current vendor thousands, and he was very lucky my friend was not in a rush....

Land_Registry

Coeus - this can sometimes happen and as already stated you will need a legal deed to transfer the ownership form the still registered names.

If there is a second transfer which does this then that would be the best outcome. However that is in my experience unlikely as why do two deeds when one can do the job by adding the two titles to it.

I suspect you may find that the conveyancing, perhaps on the part of both the seller and buyer's solicitors was at fault in not realising that there were two titles involved.

As such you may find that you need to track the seller down and get a new Transfer completed and executed, which can then be registered in it's own right.

I hope it's the former and by no means wishing to sound negative but simply advising as to what has normally happened in these situations. rtho782's post is hopefully a very much worse case scenario but until your solicitor has checked and confirmed you just cannot tell how it may play out.

Coeus

Hi Land Registry representative.


Many thanks for your detailed response.


I have contacted the solicitors today and they are pulling the case files back from archiving so should know the position on Thursday.


I am dealing with the same solicitor (individual) who did the conveyancing which is good!


She didn't seem particularly alarmed and noted it should be easy to fix but needed the files to confirm the position.


I pressed about the consequences of them potentially not having all the authorisations signed to transfer the title but she wouldn't comment at this stage.




Worst case scenario - If we assume the authorisations aren't there and the solicitors cannot do the transfer of title - I assume that would count as negligence on the solicitors behalf?


If the previous owner wouldn't sign over title or wanted further payment and the solicitor couldn't contractually force them to do this I assume they would be liable for any losses suffered as a result?




Again many thanks for all your help - very stressful!

steampowered

If the solicitor was negligent, then they (or rather their insurers) could be liable for losses suffered.

It would be best to wait and see what your solicitor comes back with after looking at the file.

Land_Registry

As steampowered explains best to hold fire on adding to any stress levels until you know the exact circumstances and next steps.

Your Qs are valid ones but next steps will be based firmly on what contract existed at the time and how the conveyancing was completed - that will help you ascertain where the mistake was made, whether negligence was involved and therefore where any recompense/culpability lies

As I posted previously this sort of thing can happen and can take time and effort to resolve but the devil is always in the detail

Richard_Webster

This sounds a bit like a case I had some years ago.

House built in 1960s and duly bought new with a mortgage by first buyers. At that time builders offered garage in blocks as optional extras that you could buy with the house or not. A few months after completing their purchase of the house the first buyers bought the garage with cash and duly obtained a separate Land Registry title to it.

I around 1980 first buyers sold their house. I imagine their solicitor asked for details of their mortgage so he could apply for the deeds from the lender. I don't think the sellers could have told their solicitor they had a separate title to the garage. Buyers can't have checked the plans which their solicitors should have sent them to check. Transaction went through, title to house transferred but vacant possession of house and garage was given.

This happened again in 1989. I assume the estate agents details mentioned the garage but nobody checked and the 1989 buyers just got title to the house.

In 2000 they came to sell and I was instructed. I looked at the agent's particulars and asked the clients where the garage was. they told me it was on a separate piece of land a few yards along the road. I checked the title at the Land Registry and found that they didn't own it and the people who did had done so since the late 1960s.

My client had had exclusive possession of the garage for 11 years, not quite enough for a possessory title, but we got neighbours to make a statutory declaration saying their predecessors had used it for years before that. This all went into the Land Registry who came up trumps - they have an alphabetical list of all the registered proprietors of land in England/Wales and even though the original owners had moved away they were able to find them and get them to acknowledge they intended to transfer the garage back in 1980. My client got an absolute title to the garage - phew!

I had another case where a modern estate house had a typical small maybe 10m deep garden but the agent's particulars described it being very long. On checking plans with buyers they told me that they understood seller had bought a long strip from a local landed estate. Back to seller's solicitors who eventually produced the title to the extra piece, telling me that their client had forgotten about the deeds to it!

The moral of these stories is check the plans!

In my first case, a lot of people didn't check the plans. You would assume someone selling a house with a garage would tell estate agents that, and they would then incorporate it in their particulars. So two solicitors didn't check the particulars with the title. Either the solicitors didn't send the plans for checking or, if they did, the buyers didn't query that the garage wasn't included.

I wonder whether something like that happened here. Didn't OP get the plans to check? Were there estate agent particulars depicting the garage on what by looking at the title plan could be seen to be a separate piece of land? It rather depends on exactly what happened as to whether OP's solicitors were negligent.