We are selling our house in Southfields. Will the lawyer need to be on the Bank of Ireland conveyancing panel in order to deal with repayment of my mortgage?
Ordinarily, even if your lawyer is not on the Bank of Ireland conveyancing panel they can still act for you on your sale. It might be that the lender will not release the original deeds (if applicable and increasingly irrelevant) until after the mortgage is paid off. You should speak to your lawyer directly before you start the process though to ensure that there is no problem as lenders are changing their specifications fairly frequently currently.
My colleague suggested that if I am purchasing in Southfields I should ask my conveyancer to execute a Neighbourhood, Planning and Local Amenity Search. Can you explain what the purpose of this search is?
A search of this type is usually quoted for as part of the standard Southfields conveyancing searches. It is not a small report of more than thirty pages, listing and detailing important information about Southfields around the property and the people living there. It includes an Aerial Photograph, Planning Applications, Land Use, Mobile Phone Masts, Rights of Way, the Southfields Housing Market, Council Tax Banding, the type of People living in the area, the dominant type of Housing, the Average House Prices, Crime statistics, Local Education with maps and statistics, Local Amenities and other useful data concerning Southfields.
Despite weeks of looking the Title Certificate and documents to my house are lost. The lawyers who conducted the conveyancing in Southfields 4 years ago have long since closed. What are my options?
Assuming you have a registered title the details of your ownership will be retained by HMLR under a Title Number. It is possible to perform a search at the Land Registry, find your house and secure up to date copies of the Registered Entries for less than a fiver. If the property is Leasehold then the Land Registry will usually hold a file copy of the Registered Lease and again, a copy can be obtained for a small fee.
I work for a long established estate agent office in Southfields where we have witnessed a number of leasehold sales derailed due to short leases. I have received conflicting advice from local Southfields conveyancing solicitors. Please can you clarify whether the owner of a flat can commence the lease extension process for the buyer?
As long as the seller has owned the lease for at least 2 years it is possible, to serve a Section 42 notice to commence the lease extension process and assign the benefit of the notice to the purchaser. The benefit of this is that the proposed purchaser need not have to sit tight for 2 years for a lease extension. Both sets of lawyers will agree to form of assignment. The assignment needs to be completed before, or at the same time as completion of the disposal of the property.
An alternative approach is to agree the lease extension with the freeholder either before or after the sale. If you are informally negotiating there are no rules and so you cannot insist on the landlord agreeing to grant an extension or transferring the benefit of an agreement to the buyer.
Following years of dialogue we cannot agree with our landlord on how much the lease extension should cost for our flat in Southfields. Does the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal have jurisdiction to calculate the appropriate figures?
in cases where there is a absentee freeholder or if there is disagreement about what the lease extension should cost, under the relevant statutes you can apply to the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) to judgment on the amount due.
An example of a Lease Extension matter before the tribunal for a Southfields property is 83 Balvernie Grove in February 2012. The Tribunal assessed the price to be paid by the leaseholder to the freeholder for the lease extension pursuant to section 48 of the Leasehold Reform Housing & Urban Development Act 1993 should be£16,603.00 This case affected 1 flat. The number of years remaining on the existing lease(s) was 69.32 years.
I acquired a flat in Southfields last 25/9/2024 and to date it is still not recorded with the Land Registry. It is part of a development site and my solicitor told me that it may take 12 months to register. I have contacted HM Land Registry directly and they have informed me the original application was cancelled due to failure to reply to requisitions. Do I need to be concerned?
It is your solicitor that you should get in touch with in order to satisfy any concerns which have been raised as part of the registration formalities for your Southfields property. Normal Southfields conveyancing practice includes an undertaking on the part of the previous owner’s property lawyer that they will help resolve any question raised by HMLR so it may be a case of seeking to enforce that undertaking if necessary.