Helping You Understand Your Right To Buy...

The Council/Housing Association have confirmed the price for your house and you have agreed to buy it – as your solicitors we now have to make sure that what the Council/Housing Association say they are selling you is correct. We check this by :-

• Checking the Title Papers from the Council/Housing Association- the Council/Housing Association have to send us papers to prove that they own the property they are selling to you and also tell us if there are any obligations or restrictions that go with it- for example that you cannot run a business from the property. The Council/Housing Association may take a few weeks to send these papers or a few months- it depends on how busy they are! Our job is to make sure that the Council/Housing Association send the Papers as quickly as possible and when we receive them to let you know and report to you on them.

• Once we have the Papers from the Council/Housing Association we will report to you on them- As you can imagine there are quite a lot of legal papers to sign but we will send you a full explanation of them at the time to make it easy for you – and we are always at the end of the phone to explain anything you don’t understand.
• You cannot go ahead until we have received the Council/Housing Association Papers and you have received your Mortgage Offer. Whichever comes first, we will report to you and send the necessary forms to you to sign and send back. We will not be able to set a completion date until we do have all those papers. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from us for a while – we sometimes have to wait for quite a while for the Papers from the Council/Housing Association.
• As soon as you receive the package from us you need to read it carefully and make sure you understand what you are signing and then send what we tell you back to us.

Once we have all of the package papers back from you we will check them to make sure everything is in order and then we will agree a date (called the completion date) with the Council/Housing Association and on that date the property becomes yours! Sometimes, certain Councils’/Housing Associations require 2 weeks from our notification to them that we are ready, before they are able to complete. They often need to check that rent payments or service charges have been paid up to date. Before the purchase is finalised we need to:-

• Obtain any mortgage money from your mortgage lender.
• Get any other money from you ( according to the completion statement that we will have sent you in the package)
• Pay the Council/Housing Association anything else they say is outstanding (there may be arrears of rent or last weeks rent still outstanding.)

Although the vast majority of the cases that we deal with are straightforward there is always an occasional case that is not so simple- this could be for a variety of reasons – the Council/Housing Association may not be able to produce all the papers to prove their ownership or they may want to see further documents from you especially if you intend to carry out improvements to the property. We are experienced solicitors and you can be sure that we will do everything we can to make the purchase as quick and painless as possible but if there are problems we will let you know about them and tell you how we will resolve them- don’t forget we are on your side!

Don’t forget that if the property you are buying is leasehold you may need to pay an amount each year to the Council/Housing Association to contribute to building insurance and maintenance. If this is the case we will let you have all the relevant details at the package stage.

As the case develops there may be other matters that we need to bring to your attention- when we need to do so we will. There may be periods when nothing seems to be happening except you paying more rent! - don’t worry we are doing what we can but sometimes legal matters take longer than you expect.

We will keep you informed on a regular basis as to what is happening (even if nothing happened since the last time!) but don’t worry about phoning us if you want to – it won’t cost you extra!
We will tell you who to ask for and also give you some direct dials to get through- don’t worry if the team can’t speak to you when you phone – just leave a message and someone will phone you back as soon as they can!

Even after the completion date there are still legal matters that we have to do on your behalf and that includes changing the ownership of the property into your names. That can take some time as we need to send papers to the Land Registry and they sometimes need to inspect the boundaries of the property- don’t worry that we don’t send you the Deeds-if you have bought the property with a mortgage – then the lender will hold the Deeds- if you bought with cash we will tell you when the Deeds are ready and we will either send them to you or we will keep them for you at no extra cost.

No – only enjoy being a proud house owner!