Garden purchased with property turns out to not be mine!

Penny0130

I am currently selling my property I bought from bloor homes 11.5 years ago. It is a 2 bedroom flat with its own garden. I've now sold the property but through land registry i have found out that most of the garden is part of neighbouring garden (affordable housing)
It is now holding up the sale which will probably fall through! Is anyone able to help? as I can't understand how bloor homes can sell me a property with a garden that was not mine! :mad:

AlexMac

Sympathies; this could be tricky or even impossible to easily fix to your satisfaction. Your own, current solicitor should be advising you, and hopefully, someone more expert will offer advice on this forum...

When you bought the flat, you should have had clear advice, before exchange, from your then conveyancing solicitor on exactly what you were buying.

(for example, when I bought my current (and previous) homes, the solicitor sent me a detailed "report on title", pointing out any snags. Last time, she included a copy of the Land Registry title Plan, and asked me to physically check that the boundaries on the map matched what I thought I was buying. She even asked me to check the a couple of protected trees on which the Council had placed TPOs were still in place.

On a previous flat purchase she- the solicitor - spotted a minor anomaly on the red-line Land Registry plan in respect of a couple of meteres of the flat's patio garden which she insisted the vendor pay to resolve )

If you used a cheap or incompetent solicitor, it might be that they gave you incorrect or inadequate information about what you were buying. So you might have redress against them for any losses you now incur.

Start by looking at whatever reports and advice they gave you at the time of the purchase. Then consider your options; which will probably mean taking legal advice in case, after a Complaint (using the original Conveyancing Solicitor's compalaints procedure) and taking independent leagal advice, starting with your current solicitor, with a view to possible legal action.

Which doesn't make you feel better tonght! Sorry

But do wait for better advice here as there are a few solicitors on the forum?

G_M

Penny0130 wrote: »

I am currently selling my property I bought from bloor homes 11.5 years ago. It is a 2 bedroom flat with its own garden. I've now sold the property but through land registry i have found out that most of the garden is part of neighbouring garden (affordable housing)
It is now holding up the sale which will probably fall through! Is anyone able to help? as I can't understand how bloor homes can sell me a property with a garden that was not mine! :mad:

Well at the time when you purchased, presumably you compared the Plan and Title of the property against what you saw in reality on the ground, and agreed that the former accurately reflected the latter?


Your solicitor at the time would not have visited theproperty,so unless you specifically asked him to confirm that the garden was included in the purchase, he would have had no way to know you were expecting the garden to be included.

OK- so much for your solicitor at the time.

Now, how about bloor homes? What do you have in writing from them describing what they were selling?

babyblade41

How on earth has it taken you 11.5 years to find out? surely right at the beginning of the procedure you were given a plan , usually edged in red showing you specifically what you were paying for ??

I would go back through all your paper work especially the title plan and see what it looks like.. if you agreed that and signed to say this was a true representation then you have some serious unravelling to do.

Also the developers paperwork from inception.. crikey for such large sums of money some people are very trusting when they sign documents .. I check everything , even more so than my solicitor.

If I hadn't checked on my last sale I would have bought a house with no land, specifically what we wanted the house for

Solicitors can only check what's in front of them, they certainly don't know the house and grounds

Tom99

My daughter bought and sold a flat with the same situation. When she bought a sworn statement by the next door neighbour was provided as to exactly how long her garden fence had been in existence.
Far from perfect, she knocked a bit off the price on purchase, lost one purchaser on sale then accepted a reduced price from someone happy to accept the risk.

stator

Do you have exclusive use of the garden?
Is it fenced off?
Can anyone else get in there?
Are you the only one who maintains the garden?



If the title wasn't registered, 12 years is needed for adverse posession, so you can start a claim soon.
If the title is registered, 10 years is needed. But once notice is served, the owner can try to take the land back. If they don't, after 1 year you can claim the land and maybe get it.