..it happened!
The sale completed.
Yes, we picked up the keys yesterday afternoon and the house is ours!
Yipp-diddly-dee.
It wasn't all plain sailing though. The sale did continue into May because the vendor wouldn't agree to leaving the clause in the TP1 form that allowed us access to her land in the event of neccessary cable or piping maintence, despite claiming to have proof we wouldn't need to. Because of this i spent the last Friday of the month ringing the local Electricity board and Gas board trying to obtain safe digging and cabling reports to illustrate the running of the serices into our property. After being passed round departments i finally spoke to people who could help although no maps would be made available that day. I had to wait for hard copies to be sent out because faxes were so ambiguous and not sufficient quality for legal purposes.
I asked whether anyone was able to give me advice over the phone and stressed the issue of time and one chap at the Electricity board stated that he thought there might be a concern regarding the electricity supply and i should wait to see the maps.
So we had to wait. There was no way i could take the risk of completing the purchase without knowing whether we would need to access the retained land to potentially reroute power supplies.
The following Tuesday, (Monday was Bank Holdiay), we received notice that the vendor now expected us to pay an additional £500 to her to meet her mortgage repayment, by Wednesday this amount had gone up to over £900. I received the Electricity report on Tuesday but had to wait another day for the gas. When i read the reports and spoke again with both departments on the phone i was reassured that the supplies didn't actually pass through her land and we should be ok to proceed.
Because however the maps were slapped with disclaimers, the avice being that they should be treated only as guides, i decided that i needed some extra reassurance. In order for the sale to complete i decided that we needed rights to access the land for up to a month after the sale in order to reroute services if we had to, otherwise we wouldn't complete.
I also stressed that in no way was i prepared to pay any extra costs to the vendor as she had delayed the sale after her solicitors had agreed the TP1 form.
She wasn't having any of it and to be honest at this point, i almost admitted defeat inside. I thought we had lost the place and was prepared for it, but the estate agents and our soicitors i believe, agreed to reduce her costs in order for the sale to complete. So in the end, they absorbed the additional costs and not her.
So now it is all over i do feel a great sense of achievement.
I managed to work through the cabling and piping issue by negotiating with the vendor through the estate agents and miraculously getting her to agree to allowing us access to her land for the sake of maintenance and rerouting purposes for the period of a month after the sale. This way we would be able to get a sparky and plumber in to check that our supplies are independant from hers and not running through her land.
The issues regarding the land rights of her retained land are no longer an issue as after speaking with the Land Registry and also taking a look around the area, i feel secure in the knowledge that any planning permission granted wouldn't negatively affect the value of our property. The vendor insists that she is keeping the land as garden for 'her own aesthetic', so that she has a 'nice' view from her studio whilst sculpting. Keeping the land in this state is something we all want, so all being well, everything should be fine there. Even if she does sell the land on, chances are the land would only be granted permission for a one story office purpose building. (There is a code for this in legal terms - it is classed as 'A2' I think).
This might sound a risk to anyone reading this, but it's not like the retained land feels like part of our property. The house has a back garden and at the end of that is a communal track, wide enough for vehicles. On the other side of this track is a raised area of garden. Along the row some properties have retained this and others have seemingly sold it on for, in one instance, an artist's studio.
So,with this in mind the land never felt like it belonged to the house anyway, when we first viewed the property.
The stress of the wholeprocess has been imense but at least this is where the fun starts and i get to live with Baj and my sis. Happy days.
So what have i learned?
Be cautious about buying land that has been newly split. If you are buying a 'transferred part' of a piece of land, then a document will have to be drawn up for each part of the now split land detailing the land rights for each parts. This document is called a TP1 form. This process can take longer than the usual transfer of a whole piece of land / properrty.
Here endeth the house buying blog and here starts the house renovation blog. Yay!
This is gonna be phototastic :)
