Trying to move into wrong house?!

mills705

I bought my flat in January (Tyneside flat) so its a street with a shared yard at the front- 1 is the upstairs first flat and 2 is the downstairs flat etc.

Number 4 (to my right) has sold and it would appear they are moving in soon. As just about every utility/ bill has been coming through my letter box. I have contacted every company- some more helpful than others.

How on earth has someone got the wrong address for every utility?! :rotfl:

SG27

Do you know for sure its the new buyers? Or is it someone setting up utilities in your name? Ie identity fraud.

mills705

SG27 wrote: »

Do you know for sure its the new buyers? Or is it someone setting up utilities in your name? Ie identity fraud.

I am about 90% sure it is. Not in my name for a start!

The guy next door moved out not so long ago!

AnotherJoe

Contact the EA and tell them the buyers appear to have set up utilities for the wrong flat.

Rosemary7391

Could be a systems problem? I had a bunch of stuff go to 1 Mystreet, when it should've been 1/5, 111 Mystreet. Systems couldn't handle the /

mills705

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Contact the EA and tell them the buyers appear to have set up utilities for the wrong flat.

I hadnt thought of that! Thanks! Will do it now.

Its not an 'odd' number system 1,2,3,4 etc. So I have no idea why he thinks he has bought number 2!

sheramber

When my son came to sell his flat he discovered the title deeds he held were for the wrong flat.

It turned out all the flats had the wrong deeds , so the deeds said situated top left, no 7, while he lived in the bottom right flat , no 2

Fortunately, all the other owners agreed to getting all the deeds corrected.

CarrieVS

I had no end of trouble with this sort of thing a few years back when I started renting a Tyneside flat. My (downstairs) flat and the one above were owned by the same person and I was told that upstairs would be rennovated later in the year and let out (this never happened but that was no skin off my nose.)

Had I remembered to ask where the boiler was while viewing the flat, I'd have been forewarned and probably wouldn't have rented it.

I worked out eventually that the two flats had been converted to a single house, then separated again. Apparently everything had been done above-board for the first conversion - combining the gas and electric supplies and registering the meters to the combined address, combining the heating systems, fitting a single burglar alarm to cover both floors, registering them as a single address and a single residence for council tax purposes.

For the reversion to two flats? Not a bean. They did swear blind that the heating and power had been disconnected from upstairs, but the boiler was still inside the back steps of the upstairs flat (I had a key, but had it been let to anyone I don't know how we'd have arranged matters, or what their plans were for it if they'd gone ahead with the renovation upstairs. They were also broken, badly mended, uneven steps covered in builders' rubble with no lighting.) The burglar alarm covered both properties, with the controls upstairs and I had to ask the landlord to sort that. I had to arrange for the flats to be valued separately before I could pay my council tax, and I couldn't put my address into any webform that used a postcode finder as my flat didn't officially exist (most have a manual entry option but not all and I couldn't order pizza delivered all the time I lived there.) The TV License people also kept sending threats that came through my letterbox even though I had a license, but I laughed that off as they were patently ridiculous.

Most relevantly to you, the meters were still registered to the address of upstairs (apparently they'd used that flat's number as the combined address) and because of this I wasn't able to find out my energy suppliers immediately, or get it rectified in time to be worth switching supplier before the end of my 6-month tenancy.

If there's any possibility of something similar having happened to you it may be worth checking that the two properties aren't officially conjoined in any way. (It sounds like it's next door and not upstairs, so perhaps less likely, but just in case.)

somethingcorporate

We bought a flat ten years ago and when it was converted and all the meters added the labelling (most in black marker, crossed out, re-written, crossed out etc) was all totally incorrect for almost every flat.


It still wasnt sorted when we moved out 3 years later!

CIS

I used to see a lot of issues with Tyneside Flats when I work at Newcastle - the number of people who didn't know their own address.... It was often a case of asking if they lived upstairs or down.


Numbering of properties was a nightmare at times - spent dozens of hours trying to sort blocks of flats and new housing developments (who had an annoying knack of changing numbering part way through the development).