The Legal Aspects of Buying a House: What Should You Know?
Buying a house is one of the more stressful experiences of adult life, though the reward is absolutely worth the hassle. With property values soon to sink, more people will be taking their opportunity to hit the market and get on the property ladder. But as well as the endless dealings with mortgage advisers and haulage companies, there are some key legal pieces of the puzzle, that it is crucial you get right.
Getting a Solicitor
Indeed, the various legal aspects to completing a house purchase all-but necessitate the hiring of a solicitor. Conveyancing solicitors are legal professionals that specialise in property law, and whose services revolve around the handling of a given property purchase’s legal steps. We will examine some of the more pressing legal elements in due course, but first – a word of warning.
It is crucial that you source a solicitor with credentials to manage the legal purchase of a property, for a number of reasons. Hiring a sub-par solicitor might get you legally across the ‘finish line’, but might also saddle you with a problem-laden property; conveyancers also organise in-depth property surveys to discover the true state of a given property ahead of sale. A conveyancer’s failure to flag up structural issues, let alone properly unearth legal elements like property boundaries, could amount to professional negligence.
Knowing this, then, what are some of the leading legal aspects to a property purchase that render a quality conveyancing solicitor important to your house-buying endeavour?
Seller Verification
First, the fundamental legality of the transaction needs to be established and proven. Who is the seller, and do they have a prior track record of property sales? Are they named on the title deed for the property, and do they have a legal right to sell the property? The property may be being sold via a limited company, for example if it was part of a large rental portfolio; what of the company’s legality?
Land Permissions
Certain plots of land or geographic regions might be beholden to regulation, which could prevent you from carrying out some essential renovation plans you had in mind. One common way in which this can surface is through a restrictive covenant, which is baked in to the title deeds for the property. Restrictive covenants are typically private agreements between prior landowners, that prevent certain changes from being made to the land – such as the building of new infrastructure.
Restrictive covenants are enforceable even if some time has passed since its writing into the title deed. It is possible to render a covenant invalid, but this can be an uphill struggle if neighbours to the land still benefit from said covenant.
Title Documents
Speaking of title documents, it is also essential that said documents are pored over and scrutinised with respect to information held on the property by other agencies. The title documents will outline exactly what is being purchased, from the number of bedrooms in the property to the square-footage of the home and its surrounding land. A conveyancer would check the Land Registry for discrepancies in the plot, as well as to ascertain ownership.
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