Selling my house - a boundary issue has cropped up

michellecovell

Hi,

My partner and I bought our house in 2004, a purchase which went pretty quick, some issues raised on a valuation (to do with property alterations) but other than that, all was well.

We were aware that there was some sort of boundary change which was agreed with the local council back in 1998 (all the gardens on the row of houses we live in moved their borders back about 8ft from what we can gather) - only by the fact that the previous owners had left a copy of the documents behind were we aware of this... which were included in a pack of relevant information (such as warranties and instructions for items left in the house - for the boiler etc) that they had left for us when we moved in.

I have no memory of this (border issue) cropping up as part of the purchase at the time... it now appears, when we have come to sell, that the title documents and the property borders don't match (according to our buyer's solicitors). We knew the back garden extended about 8ft - as highlighted, this includes the whole row of houses on our street.

We are now in a situation where we are seemed to be faced with asking the local council to agree to a formal transfer ('transfer of part' as our solicitors advise this to be), of this portion of the land before we can complete on the sale.

This is going to cost us another set of fees to pay for the council's solicitors to do this.... fees of which have been quoted are as much as we are paying for the sale itself!

This seems to be a ridiculous situation and I can't understand why this hadn't cropped up earlier and now we are having to delay the whole sale process to get this sorted. Surely this should have been addressed when we bought the property and that the mortgage company/solicitors would have raised this as an issue. Unfortunately due to the passage of time, it is very doubtful our original solicitors will have any memory, records or any explanation for this...

I'm not sure if the route we are going down is the best one here... I wonder if going for a possessory title may have been the cheaper and quicker option.

I'm concerned that the council will turn a round and try to charge us some form of notional cost for the land - land we thought we owned and have had clearly fenced off for the last 12.5 years of our ownership and was also the case from prior to us purchasing it as well (since at least 1998!).

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated as the council/their solicitors have taken over 3 weeks so far and everyone in the chain is ready to go and are waiting on us to get this issue finally sorted out.

We have considered just putting a fence up but this would then impact on the valuation and also cost to do this... plus the way the garden is set up, we would lose access to the shed and some permanent fixtures in the back that have been there for longer than we have.

Thanks for any help in advance

AdrianC

Remember that the solicitor and lender don't ever go to the house, and the surveyor doesn't ever see the legal docs.

When you bought the place, your solicitor SHOULD have asked you to look at the title plan, and confirm that the boundaries shown matched what you thought you were buying. At that stage, you should have noticed the discrepancy, raised it, and made it the vendor's problem. Your buyer's solicitor has done that, and your buyer has pointed it out, which means...

There shouldn't be any issue with transferring the land - at the outside, you have adverse possession of it - but there will be a legal cost to rectify this. You're far too late to pass it back on your purchase solicitor or the people you bought it off, so it's entirely your problem.

getmore4less

You could stick a cheap fence(two posts and a wire or two) on the documented boundary and sell without the extra 8'.

michellecovell

Unfortunately I don't remember seeing the title documents at the time and we were fairly naive - being first time buyers at that point.

It wasn't raised as an issue then, so had no reason to assume there was a problem. It wasn't picked up on the valuation either (p.s. I am aware that they do see them these days - maybe not in 2004). We simply assumed all the borders were all moved and the title documents were updated as a result years prior to us purchasing the property.

The variation was are now faced with is about 2mm when looking at the title document and as with documents as these, they do qualify the boundaries by stating that these are the 'general position of the boundaries and not the exact lines' as written on the document. All the back gardens in the street have been extended so unless we cracked out a magnifying glass, we wouldn't have spotted it.

We know two doors down had sold a few years ago (2014) and went though pretty quickly. I have a suspicion their solicitor may have missed it so we're going to pass on the details to them so they can sort things out ahead of time - rather than getting into the position we have found ourselves in when coming to sell. In fact, we are going to let the rest of the street know as I don't think any of them are aware of the situation.