Ex partner buying me out of house

snowflake85

After a few years of “will we won’t we”my partner and I have recently separated  (all fairly amicable so far), and he has agreed to buy out my share of the house. We currently own the property as tenants in common and the current mortgage is in both our names. 

He intends to remortgage the property with a new lender to buy me out.  

We’ve agreed on the valuation of the house (and a value for the contents he will be keeping), but I’m not entirely clear on the process from here (especially the extent to which I’ll need independent legal advice).

From my research so far, I understand the process is: 

- he needs to get his mortgage offer from the new lender
- his conveyancer can prep the TR1 and other land registry forms etc 
- his conveyancer arranges completion, gets the new mortgage funds - part of which will pay off and release the old mortgage and part of which should be paid to me
- remortgage completes

I’m thinking I might need solicitor input for review of the forms (e.g should the consideration be the property value only or the total amount he is paying for property plus contents), and making sure there’s an adequate arrangement for the agreed amount to be paid to me from the remortgage funds at the appropriate time? I can’t see that there would be any tax implications (neither sdlt or capital gains would be relevant here).  

There’s a lot to get my head around in general at the moment, so any views/advice/experience on the above would be gratefully received!  

 

london21

You will need your own solicitor who will give advice and inform you of the implications etc. Will not be able to use the solicitor your ex partner is using due to conflict of interest. 

tacpot12

I would suggest you call a local solictor and ask if you can get some initial advice. Many solicitors will speak to you for free.

I suspect that in your case, as long as your and your ex are jointly instructing the solicitor who is doing the conveyancing, and you both tell the conveyancer how the money is to be split, then you have adequate protection because the conveyence has to follow your orders and cannot accept a seperate set of orders from your ex. The key is that the conveyance is not his solicitor. They need to be a solicitor working for both of you. A quick call to a local solicitor as suggested above should confirm whether it will be possible for you and your ex to instruct the conveyancer jointly in this way.  

snowflake85

Thanks for the advice both!