Property value impacted by no deeded access rights?

oldjessie

Hello,

My partner and I are in the process of buying the house we currently rent from our landlord (a large property company). The property is an end of terrace on a private road, however our solicitor has informed us that there are no rights of access down the private road to access the property. The vendor has offered to pay for indemnity insurance, in case there are any attempts made to stop us using the land - however we'd like to know if this affects the value of the property, and if so should we make a lower offer based on the lack of deeded access? Our solicitor said he wouldn't be able to give us a figure on how much the value of the property would be impacted by this.

We have spoken to our neighbours who all seem to have access rights across the private road, but also say that whoever owns the land has not been seen/ heard from in decades...

Any advice much appreciated. Many thanks!!

davidmcn

If the risk can be adequately covered by indemnity insurance then there shouldn't be any effect on the value. How old is the property? If everything is the way it has been for decades then the risk of anybody trying to rock the boat should be pretty much non-existent (which is why the indemnity insurance will be relatively cheap).

tom9980

My inlaws recently sold a Mill house with a track marked on maps for 100+ years but nothing about the access written in any deeds. They had indemnity insurance which turned out to be useless arguably missold and they had been using the route for 30+ years. It devalued the property by a six figure sum roughly 1/5 of its value.

They only were able to sell after organising the purchase of land to build a new track costing £80k in total.

Crashy_Time

tom9980 wrote: »

My inlaws recently sold a Mill house with a track marked on maps for 100+ years but nothing about the access written in any deeds. They had indemnity insurance which turned out to be useless arguably missold and they had been using the route for 30+ years. It devalued the property by a six figure sum roughly 1/5 of its value.

They only were able to sell after organising the purchase of land to build a new track costing £80k in total.

Ouch......

Badger50

Lack of a documented and registered right of way has been discussed at length on this recent thread about a shared garage drive. It seems that In some circumstances a right of way can be acquired or implied - including by necessity, prescriptive use for 20 years, and common intent on the part of the original buyer and seller at the time of sale. Conditions apply to them all but you might find that you have a prescriptive right of way and if there was absolutely no other way of getting to your house a right of access out of necessity could be implied.

oldjessie

Hello all, thanks so much for your replies.

The house was built c. 1890, and is on a pedestrian only road in London. The only access to the property is down the private road by foot, off of the main road.

Our solicitor has mentioned that we could petition the Land Registry to add access rights to our deeds, which would involve getting sworn written statements from all our neighbours who have lived on the street for 20 or more years saying that the access has never been restricted to previous occupants of the house. The house has been rented out for at least 15 years so we can't get sworn statements from the previous occupiers. The Land Registry would then notify the last known address of the owners of the road, and if they don't object then we will have the access added to our deeds. However it is a condition of the indemnity insurance that we can make no attempt to contact the owners of the road - either ourselves or through a 3rd party (like the L.R.) - so we have to choose between the indemnity insurance or petitioning the Land Registry for deeded access.

I've actually found out who the owners of the private road are, both are now deceased, but obviously the land could have passed to their heirs. An interesting note is that the owners of the road are the previous director & liquidator of the property company that owned the house before the current property company bought them out. Many of our neighbours bought their houses from this old property company, and have deeded access rights, ours is the last on the road that formerly belonged to the old company, so perhaps there was just some oversight in adding access to our deed many years ago...

Badger50

You could get the wills of the deceased owners of the road to find out who their heirs were.

Cakeguts

Yes it will impact the value of the property. If it was me I wouldn't buy it. If someone comes along who can prove that they own the road they could ask you to pay a large sum of money to get the access rights. I personally don't think it is worth the risk. If the people who own it now want to sell it then they need to sort out the access.

G_M

Badger50 wrote: »

You could get the wills of the deceased owners of the road to find out who their heirs were.

https://www.gov.uk/search-will-probate

da_rule

How long has seller owned it? You could also ask for a statutory declaration from them setting out how long their tenants have been using the road for. That way, you have evidence for usage over time should you ever want to go down the prescriptive easement route.