Advice please - two separate titles being purchased

seriouslyunsurprising

Hi I'm hoping for some advice from brokers.

We are purchasing a house, currently waiting for our mortgage offer from Pepper Money, fingers crossed it will be received today or early next week.

I've just discovered that we aren't just purchasing the house and gardens, but also an additional piece of land with a separate title number which comprises an accessway around the side of the property and land at the back where the current owners park their cars. We had understood previously that the owners had the right to park on this land, but not that it was actually owned by them. This is the same understanding that we passed on to our broker, and when the valuation survey was done I presume it was on this basis (valuation report mentions parking for 3 cars but that's it).

The issue is, the extra piece of land was only officially purchased by the vendors in June this year, which means we can't exchange or complete on that title until the 20th of December. We were hoping to be in the new house by the end of Nov at the latest, and the extra few weeks would cause us quite a bit of additional stress and upheaval (we have two small children). I was discussing this with our solicitor this morning - whether it would be possible to exchange and complete on the house purchase this month ASAP, with the mortgage lender having a charge over that, and then separately we purchase the land on the 20th of Dec for cash with simultaneous exchange and completion. I appreciate there will be extra legal fees for this option.

Obviously the other option is to wait and have simultaneous exchange and completion for everything on the 20th of Dec, but honestly the idea of that fills me with horror. Our January is filled with birthdays, anniversaries etc and obviously there's Christmas to get through first. As anti-MSE it is, I'm happy to pay the extra for the convenience of moving when we want to.

My question is, will it be OK for us to do this, in terms of our lender? So we reduce the purchase price (say it's currently £285,000) by about £5k, borrow the same amount (£200,000), exchange and complete on the house in Nov and then use £5k from the sale proceeds of our house to purchase the extra land in cash with simultaneous exchange and completion on the 20th Dec?

I believe it should be OK as the extra land with the separate title number wasn't something we were aware of (ergo the lender isn't either?)

Hope to hear from someone more knowledgeable than me soon!
Thanks in advance

davidmcn

It's up to your lender. Has your solicitor actually asked them whether they can waive their six month rule in relation to the relevant bit of land?