Land Registry missing lease dead end - please help

wisteria24

bouicca21 said:

Is there any information at all about the original parties to the lease? 

Unfortunately not, the Land Registry has said that no particulars of the leases have been supplied on first registration.

Land_Registry

silvercar said:

Paging @Land_Registry. 

The OP DMd also and my reply was …..
When a lease is granted by a landlord to a tenant it is their responsibility to hold the original/counterpart leases. 

When a lease is registered/noted we will often have a copy of the lease provided and filed/scanned. But not always and it seems that’s the issue here. 

So the registered extent indicates there is a leasehold tenure but it’s unclear what extent it affects. Mention was made when the property was first registered but no more details exist. 

Leases can and do expire but the legal complexities around leasehold interests is such that it’s not always as simple as the term is up. Tenants have legal rights and doubtless the specific details within the lease are needed to confirm that the lease has expired and the interest no longer exists so it can be determined and removed from the register. Your conveyancer needs to prove that point and the lease is often crucial as a result. So it’s your conveyancer’s help you need here 

I’d also add that as it’s a 17thC lease tracking it down is likely to be a significant problem. As such it might be best to ask the buyer to discuss options with their conveyancer. I suspect, but cannot be definitive, but being able to prove in law the leasehold interest is no more may prove difficult if you don’t have a copy. As such are they able to perhaps insure against the risk of someone seeking to enforce it?
And that May all depend on whether the buyer is doing so with a mortgage and how risk averse the lender is of course 

bouicca21

Sorting out the tangle is going to be difficult if not impossible, but there are possibilities. First port of call is probably the local record office.  It might be worth looking through a standard work on the history of houses like Alcock’s Documenting the history of Houses.  But any research into the title is going to be quite specialised, time consuming, and there is obviously no guarantee of success. How long ago did the lease expire? If OP/the seller can’t put enough evidence together, how likely is it that a claimant would be able to do so?   OP is either going to have to pull out or take up the suggestion of indemnity insurance.