Bought a house with solar panels but can't prove we own them!

macman

Can you not contact the vendors direct? Draft the letter you need and simply ask them to sign and send it to you (offer to pay the postage etc if they want).
Failing that, invoke the formal complaints procedure with your solicitor in writing-don't phone or email them.

rjanson

Thanks for the advice. I had no idea that the solar panels should be listed in the TA10 too, and apparently neither did the sellers. This is something the solicitors should have picked up on, given that both sets knew the panels were part of the sale. I don't get the feeling that the sellers have tried to mislead us in any way, as it seems like they've been honest and upfront and have tried to make the switching process easy in other ways (e.g. providing all paperwork to do with purchase and installation of panels, MCS certificate and letting the FIT provider know that we were taking over the FIT).

However, we never actually met our sellers and all contact was either through the estate agent or our respective solicitors, so there's no chance of contacting them directly. From the TA6 and TA10 forms, we do have the name of their solicitors, so it may be worth trying to make contact through them.

I've escalated the issue to the head of the conveyancing department at the solicitors. I actually received an email response from him that he'll look into it. Next step would be the complaints procedure though.

franklee

rjanson wrote: »

However, we never actually met our sellers and all contact was either through the estate agent or our respective solicitors, so there's no chance of contacting them directly. From the TA6 and TA10 forms, we do have the name of their solicitors, so it may be worth trying to make contact through them.

What do you do with post for them? Even redirection fails sometimes. You could write a letter to the sellers addressed to your old house and then drop it off at the estate agent saying some post has come for the sellers can they send it on. Or just pop it in the post and hope Royal mail redirection picks it for redirection.

Plus you could try a chat with the estate agent. You could write a letter to the sellers and ask the estate agent to send it on. Or you could send it to your solicitors or their solicitors with a please forward note on it.

Or you could try to find them if you know the area they moved to by doing a land registry search on the completion date but that would need a fairly narrow location.