Has anybody got any experience of buying land from his or her neighbour? My neighbour has agreed to sell me a strip of his land 6ft by 50ft; basically moving the boundary fence over 6ft, is there a simple way of registering this change without getting solicitors involved? as there fees will probably be more than the land is worth.
You might like to ask the question in uk.legal.moderated. The unmoderated group is something of a bear pit.
If you got the land for less than a few grand in an urban area you have been very lucky. My solictor charges 200-300 quid for a full house convayance, so I would expect the same - or less for the land.
Rick
It's a costly excercise. You do need to involve solicitors - as well as the Land Registry folks. Both sets of property deeds need to be retrieved and amended.
I was 'quoted' about £600 in legal fees plus £100 Registry fees for 'my half' of a similar deal - your neighbour's fees would be a little lower - but not much.
If you don't do it 'the legal way' then you're both saving up trouble for when one of you decides to sell !
Sorry ! Adrian Suffolk UK ======return email munged================= take out the papers and the trash to reply
Considering you don't *need* solicitors to buy a house, I doubt it.
Contact the Land Registry, they will tell you what to do.
NB. Land sales *must* be put in writing - and presumably in the correct form.
Yes - bought a field off my neighbour (and I've done 8 other bits of conveyancing). Get hold of one or two of the standard diy conveyancing books (e.g. Which?, Bradshaw), and you'll find that it's often a fairly trivial administrative task. You often don't even need a contract - you can go straight to the transfer deed, which is just a downloadable Land Registry form if the title is registered.
You may prefer to seek help if the neighbour's title is not registered, and he will need to involve his lender's solicitor if he has a mortgage.
The Land Registry web site is excellent
You can buy land/property with only a verbal agreement if you so wish. They are as binding as any other agreement as long as they can be proved - problems might arise when you try to sell the land and need to prove your ownership. So a simple documented exchange with receipts and witnesses to signatures might be a good idea. Incidentally land registry doesn't prove ownership - they don't necessarily check details and the same land can be registered by different people esp where boundaries are indefinite or unresolved.
cheers
Jacob
Simply not true (at least in Scotland). Contracts for the sale of heritable property (and a lot of other things) must be probative. Conveniently for business, Scots law recognises writings in re mercatoria as being probative, but for a land sale there would have to be a probative document.
Owain
In message , Richard writes
As well as employing a solicitor, you should consider an architect to draw a proper plan. If you do this yourself, and get it wrong, you could be opening the door on a boundary dispute in the future.
In addition, it could cause problems when you come to sell.
That is contrary to (incidental) legal advice that I have received in the past. Do check. IANAL.
Except that architects get things wrong and having an apparently fixed and carefully prepared plan which is also wrong can intensify disputes. The more precise a drawing the more detailed can be a dispute. In reality boundaries are often decided on the basis of visible existing boundary fences etc and a crude solicitors drawing, often small scale and drawn with a felt tip which scales up to a metre wide. In other word boundaries are a bit flexible and common sense plays a part.
cheers
Jacob
BTW, and not terribly relevant in this case, but I personally will not do business with anyone doing their own conveyancing. Having been bitten once by some retard who thought they knew what they were doing, I'm not taking the chance of it happening again. Moving house is quite stressful enough.
To the OP; I bought some land from the farmer next door, and the cost of my solicitor was a minute proportion of the total cost. Get a solicitor.
IANAL, but what you say does not accord fully with the experience of a couple of friends of mine. Their land was registered with a mistake in the boundary line. Although all parties agreed this was a mistake, what's in the land registry cannot be argued with and is definitive. Fortunately, all parties agreed it was a mistake and the land was sold from one party to the other for a notional pound or some such, and the land registry records then reflected the correct boundary. You might be describing some type of land registration where the land is actually registered as "ownership in dispute", or some such -- I don't know if that possibility exists. Also, land which hasn't been sold since some date (1972?) might not be registered at all.
If the mistake is on the part of the land registry itself, it still cannot be corrected, but you can sue them for your losses. This happened in the case where a couple had a house sitter whilst they were on holiday. The house sitter managed to sell the house and do a runner with the money before they returned. The land registry had been negligent in checking ownership, but the transaction had gone through and could not be corrected on the couple's return from holiday. They could however sue the land registry for the loss of their house.
You must be a solicitor, or an architect. Why on earth would someone need an architect to draw plans to move a fence.
Yes.
Not really is my opinion. We bought an area of land about 9x6ft from our neighbours that had a small building on it. It was to rectify the difficult situation of him having a flying freehold. It cost us about £3k including legal fees and then another £1k for the demolition and making good.
In article , John Cartmell writes
Course when you buy a house your just buying the land and the house that happens to sit thereon......
Thanks for all the responses
Just contacted the land registry office and the advice was to get a solicitor. They said I could do it myself but it could slow down the sale of my neighbour's property, which incidentally they are selling. They said they didn't want to 'put me off' but they wouldn't be able to assist me at all because that was the job of a solicitor. Although irrelevant, to get the amount of land into perspective my neighbours garden is approximately 200ft long by 100ft wide and I was proposing to take a 6ft off the length over only half of the width. Incidentally, I took advice from above and posted the same post on the uk-legal site, (un-moderated granted) no response on the forum but I did receive an email almost immediately directing me to a solicitors web site, which was ironic considering my question.
As suggested in an earlier post I've ordered 'Bradshaws' book and I'll have a read through that just to see how easy or difficult it is to do myself, although receiving that email does give you that little bit more incentive to do it yourself, especially since we both have our title deeds and there are no mortgage companies involved.
its not often we hear such definitive advice here :)
NT
OK, I don't think you told us this. Makes a difference.
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