Sales

Legal Services for Selling your Property

Title deeds

These documents comprise of conveyances or leases of the property in the past and include any land charges searches. Details of previous local searches will also usually be contained within the bundle. This file will usually be in the possession of your lender (if any). If a purchase of the property has taken place since the de-materialisation of title deeds came about (following the inception of the Land Registration Act 2002), any previous solicitor who acted for you may be holding them for safekeeping, or they may have sent them to you.

Official Copy of Register Entries

If the title to your property is registered, there will be an Official Copy of Register Entries at HM Land Registry. This document gives a description of the property, details of the registered proprietors and on what basis the property is held. It also shows any charges on the property by way of restrictive covenants and/or financial charges for example, to a Bank or Building Society, as well as any cautions on the property.

We will apply to HM Land Registry for a copy of the register and filed plan at a small disbursement of £6.

Freehold properties

For Freehold properties it will be necessary to supply the purchasers with a copy of the conveyance(s) referred to in either:

• The Official Copy of Register Entries (if your title is registered), or;
• The Epitome of Title (if your title is unregistered)

If these documents can’t be found within your title deeds, we will need to apply to HM Land Registry for an Official Copy of the conveyance (assuming your title is registered), again at a disbursement cost to you of between £3 to £18.

Leasehold properties

For leasehold properties, it will be necessary to supply the purchasers with a copy of the lease or under-lease. If we cannot find these documents within your title deeds, we will apply to HM Land Registry for an official copy of the lease, at a disbursement cost to you of between £3 and £18.

Ground landlord

For leasehold properties, there will be a ground landlord who will usually retain the benefit of the covenants contained in the lease. Your ground landlord is usually (but not always) the company or person to whom you pay your ground rent to.

It is common for the majority of leases to contain a provision that any alteration or addition to the property since first construction should not take place without the prior written consent of the ground landlord. It is often the case that for alterations such as extensions and conservatories the proprietors do not have the appropriate written consent.

In order for us to remedy this situation, if the alteration is fairly recent, we will usually have to apply to the ground landlord for retrospective consent for which the ground landlord will charge a fee (usually in excess of the fee they would have initially charged for giving consent to the alteration originally). The other alternative is to put into place a suitable indemnity policy to cover the breach of covenant.
Contract

This document sets out the formalities of the transaction and incorporates the standard conditions of sale. These are common to every conveyancing transaction in England and Wales. There are also special conditions attached to the contract, an example of which is protecting your position with regard to the buyer’s failure to complete, following exchange of contracts and claiming the full ten per cent deposit from them even if less was received on the exchange of contracts. You will be asked to sign an engrossment of this document prior to the exchange of contracts.

Purchase deed (Form TR1)

This form passes the legal title to the purchaser on completion and contains similar information to the contract and is submitted by the purchasers with their registration application following completion. You will be asked to sign an engrossment of this document prior to the exchange of contracts.

Exchange of contracts

This occurs when solicitors of both the vendor and purchaser are holding signed contracts and are both satisfied as to the property’s title and any other miscellaneous points. Having received your authority to exchange contracts on your behalf, your solicitor will proceed to exchange. Once this has been done, you will have entered into a legally binding agreement with the other party to the transaction.

Completion of the transaction

This will be the day that you hand your keys over to the agent and move out of your property. On this day, all of the proceeds of sale should have been received by us. The redemption of any existing mortgages will take place followed by the net proceeds of the sale being used in connection with your purchase and any balance remaining thereafter will be forwarded to you.

This is the procedure that we adopt for the majority of purchases and is aimed to give you an idea of how a transaction will flow. We estimate that a standard purchase transaction should take between 6 – 8 weeks.