Merging freehold/leasehold

ellsbells97

Hi all, 

First time buyer and having a bit of a nightmare. My partner and I had an offer accepted over the summer, things were sailing through, and we were told by our solicitor and the estate agent that we could expect to complete in October. We've now been waiting for more than 5 months since having our offer accepted, we signed our contract (not exchanged yet) which have been sat with our solicitor since late October and we're good to go. 

We've hit a snag - as far as we've been made aware, it turns out that the house our sellers are buying is a freehold property, however there is a small parcel of land with it which is leasehold. When that house was last sold, the previous solicitors didn't register the leasehold properly. To be clear, this is not the house we're buying, so all the information we're getting is second hand and a bit unclear. Our understanding is that the previous solicitors from the last time the house was sold have now got involved to merge the freehold and leasehold titles and presumably to retroactively register them. We've finally got through the torturous 8-9 week wait for the land registry to even acknowledge the query, and they now have the requisitions they needed to crack on. However, they received these just before Christmas, so the 'cracking on' appears to not really be happening, the wait times on their website are frankly terrifying, and nobody can give us an even very rough timeframe. 

Other than this, everyone in the chain is ready - we went to view our house to get some measurements last month and our sellers assured us that they're good to go once this issue is sorted, and they're as frustrated as we are. 

Can anyone who has been in the same or a similar position advise us on how long we can expect to wait to get this sorted? It feels like there's nothing we can do at all to speed this up and the powerlessness is making me more stressed than anything else at this point. 

eddddy

Just to clarify - what you describe doesn't sound like merging a leasehold and freehold.

For example, if you owned the leasehold of a house with land, and bought the freehold of that same house and land - you could merge the leasehold and freehold.


But you seem to be describing a freehold house with some land, and a separate piece of leasehold land (which is next to the freehold house and land).

The background is likely to be:

• Sometime back, Mr A owned a freehold house/land plus some adjacent leasehold land
• Mr A sold to Mr B
• Mr B bought the freehold house/land, but thought the adjacent land was included - but it wasn't. So Mr B isn't the registered owner of the adjacent land. Mr A still is still the registered owner the adjacent leasehold land.
• Mr B is now selling the property to Mr C
• Mr C has realised that the adjacent land isn't included

So Mr A still owns the leasehold land.

So it's probably a case of tracing Mr A and asking him to transfer the leasehold land to Mr C.

So it depends how hard it is to find Mr A, and how cooperative Mr A will be.

ellsbells97

eddddy said:

Just to clarify - what you describe doesn't sound like merging a leasehold and freehold.

For example, if you owned the leasehold of a house with land, and bought the freehold of that same house and land - you could merge the leasehold and freehold.


But you seem to be describing a freehold house with some land, and a separate piece of leasehold land (which is next to the freehold house and land).

The background is likely to be:

• Sometime back, Mr A owned a freehold house/land plus some adjacent leasehold land
• Mr A sold to Mr B
• Mr B bought the freehold house/land, but thought the adjacent land was included - but it wasn't. So Mr B isn't the registered owner of the adjacent land. Mr A still is still the registered owner the adjacent leasehold land.
• Mr B is now selling the property to Mr C
• Mr C has realised that the adjacent land isn't included

So Mr A still owns the leasehold land.

So it's probably a case of tracing Mr A and asking him to transfer the leasehold land to Mr C.

So it depends how hard it is to find Mr A, and how cooperative Mr A will be.

Makes sense - as I say, everything is what we've heard from our vendor/estate agent.

I guess this leads to the question (and this is genuine ignorance on my part, there is probably a good reason) - why can't this be resolved after our vendors have moved?

RAS

Because your vendors want to buy both pieces of land. And a LOT depends on both happening simultaneously. It could even be impossible for your vendor to get into one piece of land without purchasing the other. 

And since your vendor's vendor doesn't own the second piece, everything depends on someone who hasn't actually put their property on the market.

eddddy

ellsbells97 said:

I guess this leads to the question (and this is genuine ignorance on my part, there is probably a good reason) - why can't this be resolved after our vendors have moved?

If you imagine that you want to buy a house with a garden, and somebody suggests to you:

• "Buy just the house now, and after completion you might or might not be able to buy/own the garden as well".

You might say 

• "I don't want a house without a garden. So I'm not exchanging contracts on the house, until I'm certain I can buy/own the garden as well"

And maybe it's not clear...

• who actually owns the garden at the moment,
• and/or how the garden owner can be contacted,
• and/or whether the garden owner will agree to 'hand over' the garden
• and/or whether the garden owner will ask for a chunk of money before 'handing over' the garden
• and/or who made the mistake that caused this mess

So it could all get resolved in a few weeks, or it might take months, or it might take years. And I doubt that the buyer (i.e. your seller) will exchange contracts until it's sorted.


(But the above is based on what you said in your first post, plus some assumptions. If you can get more info, it might turn out that some of the assumptions are wrong.)