Bumps in the road - Tell us your woes

We're selling our leasehold flat, which we've owned for fifteen years. The flat comes with a garage, but unfortunately a Land Registry error has resulted in our garage being added to our neighbours' plan instead of ours.

Initially, assuming it was an old solicitor error, we were going down the deed of variation route. But then our solicitor blew up the Land Registry image (as in magnified, not exploded) and discovered faint cross-hatching on our neighbours' plan where the garage is located, showing that the garage should never have been included in their plan. So, a Land Registry error.

We've owned the garage for fifteen years. We've used it for fifteen years. Our neighbours have known for fifteen years that it is our garage. But in order to rectify the mistake, Land Registry have sent a notice to our neighbours, who have the option to object to the plans being corrected and have fifteen working days to do so.

So, everything has stalled until that's sorted out.

Hopefully, that will be our one big selling glitch (she says, tempting fate). But we are selling our house too, so there's probably a lot of room for more fun and games in the months ahead. :undecided

First property I bought was a tenth floor ex-council flat, was buying for £110K. Was close to exchange when my solicitors discovered that the council were soon to start balcony renovations for which each leaseholder had been notified they would have to contribute about £10K (and it certainly wouldn't add £10K of value - or indeed a tenth of that - to the property). Vendors claimed to have no knowledge of it, a blatant lie. Nearly pulled out until they agreed to knock most of it off the asking price.

Second property I bought, the vendors weren't originally planning to sell until we knocked on their door to ask about the area after viewing their next door neighbour's house, and they invited us in and then offered to sell us theirs instead, which was nicer, for £10K less. Then shortly before exchange they realised they had a £10K early repayment charge on their mortgage, and tried to pull out. (We decided to pay £10K more rather than lose the house, since that "merely" brought it back up to market value.)

Had plenty!

First attempted purchase, vendor lost her job so had to take house off market.


When husband and I first bought a place together, we found the recent leasehold extension hadn't been registered with Land Registry, cue another few weeks to sort that out.


Then when we came to sell it, we'd developed a small patch of knotweed just on the 7m boundary, which husband had treated for 3 years and we were just on the edge of the time when it would be considered gone for good, but had to declare it. Couldn't get it treated with a mortgage-backed guarantee scheme, as there was nothing to treat! Fortunately our buyer in the end was unphased and it was clear by then it had not returned for well over a year.


We also had a 'mare in that our neighbours had relined their basement since we moved in, and I think this caused a small bit of water from an underground stream to pass through a corner of the cellar. This was *such* a pain, we lost at least 3 potential offers just because of this tiny trickle of water, even after we had a specialist surveyor in who reported it was not a problem as the water was passing through and draining out, and the basement was never supposed to be totally dry. Again, eventual buyer was unphased, I think he just raised basement floor a bit and put in a pump in the end.


Then we tried to buy a former rental place where the owner was blatantly continuing to show it after accepting our offer and the agents were aggressive nightmares. Fell through when we lost our buyer, and nearly got back on track again once we found our buyer, but aggressive vendor agent blamed our agents for 'not keeping them informed' for accepting another offer. We'd never had got it anyway, they'd clearly have sold it under our noses to a higher offer half an hour before exchange without a second thought!


Purchase of our current house and sale to last buyer (I still thank heavens we found him, we could have been stuck there for years more due to the stupid water and the stupid knotweed otherwise) went very smoothly though.

Seems very dodgy and by the sounds of it that we are about to lose our dream home

possibly but landlord insurance policies don't like empty properties and when you sell a house you have to prove it's insured (I recently did). S/he may just be covering their back.