More Paperwork

I have now tracked down all of the guarantees, certificates and permissions and so on and bundled the whole lot up with a covering letter and delivered it round to the solicitors' office yesterday afternoon. I have given him all the originals as the thought of scanning all that lot in through a home printer / copier / scanner was more than I could cope with – I would have needed to stop for a shave half way through! I am glad that it is all done now – another job ticked off the list.

I think the purchaser will be getting a survey later this week. I would be surprised if anything came out of that so we are making good progress.

Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork

A huge amount of guff arrived from our solicitors yesterday morning so I spent last night trying to find all the guarantees and other documents required to complete the sale. I was struck, whilst watching the news on the BBC at the same time how much extra money I could save if I had a second home allowance similar to our elected representatives, that way I could execute a quick "flip" to avoid CGT having had some help with the refurbishments costs. Oh well – I shall have to remain a humble tax payer.

I have written to the solicitor who claims in one of his two letters to arrive to have obtained Office Copy Entries. I thought the whole point of a HIP was to avoid the need to get these reports – instead it appears we are paying for two of them! I shall wait and see what he says.

Just got to find the guarantee and inspection certificate for the central heating system and wait for the final certificate from the Local Authority's building control which I have only just realised we haven't got yet.

Update

I got all of the documents from the solicitor yesterday. I am sure that the amount of paperwork involved in buying a house has increased over the years whilst the government is pushing everyone towards e-conveyancing.

I suspect we are close to exchanging now. Completion in early November? Let’s hope so. I continue to be nervous with all the bad news stories around every day but I still think we are buying this house at the right price to give us a return when the work is done.

This blog may be able to move onto the building phase soon.

One month on

I am getting a bit fed up with how long it is taking to exchange contracts and complete on this deal. Looking back over my records we made an offer on August 22nd and agreed a price on August 27th. That is one month ago today. Great play was made of the fact that the vendor wanted to sell fast and we had our offer accepted on the grounds that we did not need to get a mortgage on the new house. We were told that the vendor had already received the grant of probate so there was no need for any delay. It turns out that this was not the case and an application had not been made. We are told that they subsequently applied but as of yesterday (Friday) it had still not been granted. So why does this delay matter? There are several reasons.

• We have spent money on surveyors fees and legal fees. We would have avoided commissioning any work had we known that the vendor wasn't ready to sell straight away. It only took two days between ordering the survey and receiving the report so it would not have caused any additional delay. Similarly the additional searches and enquires our solicitors have made could have waited.


• House prices have fallen again since the deal was struck. This is not the vendors fault however we should have been well in to the refurbishment project by now.


• After our offer had been accepted the Government made their announcement about increasing the stamp duty threshold to £175,000. This house is slightly over that figure and it sits firmly in the dead spot between £175,000 and £200,000. Again this is not the vendors fault however it seems to me that by increasing the rate, the Government effectively caused all house prices that were just over the threshold to fall to just below it. As a point of principle I did not try and re-negotiate the price after the announcement but I assumed we would be getting on with it.


• We had always hoped to have the refurbishment finished by Christmas with the house re let or put back on the market. Bearing in mind completion is a minimum of two weeks away now it will not be possible to complete the work by Christmas and some of the jobs will take longer during the Winter months.


• As a final (and not really related point) we offered to purchase the house on the basis that it was structurally sound. It is true that we have found more work to do than we were expecting and I was naive about the DPC but the need to re-render and re-point the outside walls is disappointing.

So there you are. I have gone from being very positive to a bit flat over the course of two days. I have approached the agent with my concerns and at the moment I think the chances of this deal happening are only 50/50 from 90/10 in favour a couple of days ago. We shall see what Monday brings.

Limited Title Guarantee

When I got home from work last night we had received a letter from our solicitor with a copy of a letter they had received from the sellers solicitors.

The letter is all about the fact the they will only be offering a "Limited Title Guarantee" as it appears the house we are buying was left to somebody in a will who subsequently died as well, leaving their assets to somebody else.

That all seems quite sad to me. The person who was supposed to get the house never got a chance to enjoy their inheritance, I am sure this would not have been what the original owner would have wanted.

The letter goes on to confirm that they will not be able to exchange until they have probate. That's OK. It will give us more time to work on budgets etc.

Whilst I shouldn't really criticise the use of English I am struck by the grammatical and other errors in the letter from the sellers lawyers. I will resist the temptation to scan a copy of the letter in but the highlight has to be the phrase:-

"..... selling in that capacity. and so the title"

When I was at school (a long time ago) sentences started with a capital letter and not the word "and". Perhaps they don't proof read letters any more.

Looking up what a "Limited Title Guarantee" is I am finding lots of definitions similar to the one below.

"This is the title guarantee given by a seller where because of their limited knowledge of the property the full title guarantee cannot be given (e.g. a personal representative of a deceased owner or a mortgagee in possession)"

I guess this is OK but I'll will know better when our solicitors gives me a report on title prior to exchange.

Starting Out

I never set out to be a property developer. In fact until the middle of August I hadn’t given much thought to the subject at all.

I had always had a niggling thought at the back of my mind along the lines of “I wish I had kept my last flat instead of selling it to buy a house” but thoughts like that are as valid as saying “I wish I could go back in time and buy four or five houses in my street when they were built in the 1930s”. They were so cheap then. None the less there does seem to be a lot of people who own more than one house and at the moment I am not one of them.

So why the change of heart? Very simply, our neighbours. They decided to put their house on the market. They claim that it had nothing to do with the fact that we had just applied for planning permission to build a large extension on our house but you can never be sure.

Shortly after they told us they were selling the agents board went up and within five minutes we were on the internet looking up the price. It still seems slightly obscene to ask your neighbour how much they are selling their house for but perfect reasonable to go and look it up.

After looking at the price of their house I took the opportunity to see what else the agent had to sell and there it was. A 1900’s two up two down detached house requiring complete modernisation. Without really thinking it through I phoned up the estate agent and arranged to go around and view the house with the rest of the family that afternoon.

So what was it like?

The house, which is painted white, is on a reasonably busy road without it’s own parking but there is plenty of parking on the street. There is a tiny front garden and the front door opens directly onto the front room which leads to the back room which leads to the kitchen which leads to the bathroom. Splitting the front and back rooms is a staircase that would give a mountaineer difficulties. At the top of the stairs there are doors left and right leading to two decent sized bedrooms. Allegedly there is 70ft garden however it was so over grown I didn’t make it further than about 6 ft before being turned back by some vicious thorn trees. I think we’ll take the agents word for the length of the garden!

To the untrained eye (mine) the house looks structurally sound however it needs at a minimum a complete re-wire, replacement central heating and plumbing, new windows, a new kitchen and bathroom, a lot of re-plastering (much of it has come away from the wall), complete redecoration, some new flooring and maybe some new ceilings. It seems amazing to me that somebody was living here until recently but I guess it would look a little better with furniture in the house as that would cover up a multitude of sins.

We have put an offer in, which has been accepted, by making a load of guesses and assumptions on the work required and now we need to do some detailed assessments on what it will cost to complete the refurbishment.

Solicitors and surveyors have been instructed and we should get a chance to see if more work is required over and above the original assumptions.

Incidentally, at the time of this blog entry we have had our offer accepted but haven’t exchanged contracts so this could end up being the shortest blog in history.