Purchased property not owned by vendor..

navrav

Well for over 4 years I didnt know there was a problem. Sunday night I discovered the problem,
Monday morning I discovered why there was a problem and since then I'm even more worried as the beneficial ownership in trust that should protect me doesn't apply when they didn't own the land to hold in trust

Tiglet2

Do you still have any of the correspondence/paperwork supplied by your solicitor when you purchased?

If you can locate any paperwork, there may be some clues held within. For example, the solicitor should have written to you early on in the process with some information about the property you were buying. It should have enclosed a copy of the title plan (title number displayed on this document). The solicitor would have asked you to look at the title plan and confirm that the boundaries conform to your understanding of the plot. Did you only receive one title plan and no information whatsoever about the unregistered land adjoining?

If the piece of land in question was an additional plot and not shown on the title plan, I assume you queried it at the time? Did the solicitor know that there was an additional piece of land that you thought you were buying? If so, I assume that as the land was unregistered, then the previous owner would have to claim possessory title over it. This takes a while for Land Registry to survey/write to potential interested parties/transfer ownership to the vendor. Once the land was transferred to the vendor, he can then sell to you.

Did you complete the purchase before Land Registry had transferred ownership to the vendor? I note you do not have a mortgage. Mortgage lenders would not proceed without the possessory title being transferred to the vendor and then to you. Obviously if there is no lender involved, you may well have gone ahead and completed before this was sorted out. Try to remember if, at the time, you were eager to complete and, maybe put pressure on the solicitor because you were keen not to lose your buyer etc etc. It may be that once the transaction completed, no-one followed up the need to transfer the piece of land to you. Once Land Registry had completed the transfer to the vendor, nothing was done to transfer it to you and you file ended up being put in the Dead box as an admin assistant thought the transaction had ended.

You absolutely do need that file to be retrieved soonest. Solicitors will often only keep files for six years before they are destroyed, so my advice would be to either escalate to the highest level at your conveyancing solicitors with the threat of the ombudsman or get another one involved asap. It may cost you some money (or not, depending on what/how it went wrong), but surely you want your name on those deeds?

Good luck!

getmore4less

Even though they may not have had registered legal title you/they contracted to sell you the land to you so should still be liable to hand over the legal title.

Probably less of a problem now they have registered legal ownership, would be worse of it had been someone else.

They would either have to buy it for you or compensate.

navrav

>>It should have enclosed a copy of the title plan (title number displayed on this document). The solicitor would have asked you to look at the title plan and confirm that the boundaries conform to your understanding of the plot. Did you only receive one title plan and no information whatsoever about the unregistered land adjoining?

Yes and actually the title number displayed when I checked yesterday was for a 3rd piece of land nothing to do with the two actual pieces of land. However the boundary drawn was for my plot and showed no indication of it being two plots.

>Did you complete the purchase before Land Registry had transferred ownership to the vendor?

As mentioned above - the document I received showed one boundary and the document title reference when i looked it up yesterday appears to be for a different piece of land altogether - it would appear someone just drew the boundary in red on another plan. I foolishly assumed my solicitor would have checked it was genuine.

Tiglet2

The solicitor doesn't visit the property and has no way of knowing if the boundaries shown on a title plan are correct. This is why they ask you to check that the boundaries (in red) accord with your understanding.

navrav

Which I did. The plan submitted to me was correct. It just doesn't correspond to the land registry plans for the two bits of land, the SK number wasnt visible at the time till i removed the staple and checked it yesterday

moneyistooshorttomention

Is the need to know the answer to this question an urgent one - eg you have just decided to sell this property and need to know how to answer a potential buyer on this?

Or - on the other hand - can you afford to "wait it out"?

There could possibly be a different answer to your question according to which scenario we are talking about here.

If it's the "time is on your side" scenario - then maybe you've got time to do an adverse possession claim on that bit of your land that isnt on your title (because the blinkin' vendor has proven to be surreptitiously trying to hold onto it) - ie wait it out however many years you have to. None of us could predict for sure whether that would work I guess - but it could be a possibility.

I dont normally advocate "adverse possession" - as it normally means trying to whip someone else's land off them. In your case, however, it is your blinkin' land - but just isnt officially in your possession by the sound of it iyswim.

navrav

I don't think I'm prepared to wait 7 years for adverse possession as never mind the garden not being owned by him - the title of my house is currently not transferred either from the bit of land he does own.

TBagpuss

Make a formal complaint to your original solicitor. Keep a copy of everything you send them or they send you.

It may be worth you contacting a new solicitor and asking them to request the file.

The 8 weeks thing - it's a maximum, the Ombudsman may find that it is poor service on their part if they don't respond more quickly, it's just that you can't normally go to the ombudsman until you've given the original solicitor 8 weeks.

However, normally in that 8 weeks you would expect them to have acknowledged the complaint, reviewed the file and been in touch with you to either give you more information or to give you a timescale as to when you should hear, possibly even to have been invited to met with them to discuss things.

If the issue was that there were 2 pieces of land, they would not necessarily have known that but in that scenario I would expect the bit they i now about to have been registered to you, even if that means there was a piece of land which wasn't registered. And they ought to have noticed that they had either not had the confirmation from the Land Registry that the transfer had been registered, or that they had had a letter from the LR that there was an issue.

Since the clock starts ticking on the 8 weeks when you make a formal complaint, do that now, in writing.

By the way, if you do consult another solicitor and they request the file, the first one has to provide it.

They can't hold on to it to respond to your complaint, they would be expected to make a copy of it for their own use for that purpose, and to send the original on to your new solicitor. Equally, you can request the file yourself from them. So the claim that the file would be 'locked' for 8 weeks, is ... not entirely accurate. (and a delay in 8 weeks in providing your file when you ask for it would probably be seen as further poor service by the ombudsman, should you get that far)

Either way, there may be a small admin charge for retrieving the file, (provided they told you in their original client care letter or closing letter that there would be) but they can't charge you to copy the file so they can keep a copy to deal with the complaint.

If they don't deal with the complaint within the 8 weeks you can go to the ombudsman or, depending on the advice you're given by your new solicitor, may want to make a claim instead,this sounds as though it is likely to need to go to their insurers, especially if it is the whole of your property, not just part, which wasn't registered to you and is now registered to your seller.

If the issue is that the main house was registered to you and there is a separate piece of land that wasn't, the situation is a bit more complicated as a lot will depend on whether your solicitor knew that you were expecting to get that bit as well, and for that reason it may well be that you need to have the file checked by someone new, so they can see what exactly happened and who said what.

Keep us updated.

phillw

navrav wrote: »

Apparently the application for transfer was again made after this by my solicitors and that application was again rejected.

If they didn't do this then it sounds like a serious breach of their duties and if they haven't been able to resolve this in 4 years, they aren't going to prioritise sorting it out.

In fact they seem to be going on holiday.

I wouldn't trust them to sort the problem out, I'd ask they release the file immediately and take it to another solicitors and deliver a letter informing them you will be instructing your new solicitor to bill for any work required due to their negligence & then report them to the SRA anyway.

You might not be able to bill them for all the work, because it sounds like it would have cost you extra to deal with a dodgy vendor. I'd be seeking some costs from the vendor.