Mate of mine bought a house - cash - about three months ago. Emigrated to SA and sold the house - or rather accepted an offer. Buyer discovered the extension has no planning permission. Mate is tearing his hair out. He didn't have the house surveyed before buying as it was quite new and appeared to be in good condition.
Discuss. ;-)
So his solicitor/conveyancer did a better job than your mate's solicitor.
Let it be a lesson.
Surveyor would not have identified planning issues.
He needs to get on to the solicitor, or whoever did his conveyancing during his purchase. The standard questionnaire asks about these sort of things. Maybe it was the original vendor who lied.
MBQ
'They' are usually only after getting you to buy an indemnity policy...
Happened to me buying our first house. Although we had a solicitor do the conveyancing and "all" due diligence at the time they had gone out of business 5 years later when we came to sell the house. Fortunately our new set of solicitors took it in their stride and obtained retrospective planning permission for us without too much difficulty. Just delayed things and made for severely shorter finger nails...
I suspect it could be a lot harder if the extension crossed a building line or the council decided to be bolshy about it. This sort of thing only shows up when you try to sell your house - that your original solicitor basically did not know which way is up :(
Probably better off discussed in uk.legal really
Why does he need PP? Have the council enquired/someone complained?
He is trying to sell the house.
The people who are buying it have noticed the paperwork is not in order. Their solicitors were on the ball unlike his.
You don't just "get a certificate of lawfullness". You apply for one and hoope your local authoity will grant it. They don't always.
he bought it 3 months ago?
I'd read that most banks won't touch a property that's been sold so recently anyway.
Is he making a loss?
He's emigrated. Quite suddenly, as he met a woman on holiday and married her.
Why on earth not? People die. And so on. Any number of valid reasons why you might want to sell shortly after buying.
NT spake thus:
I bought an insurance indemnity policy against PP being invalid. It cost £160, is perpetual and may well be worth many, many times that when I come to sell the house.
round here, a married couple bought a house together and divorced shortly afterwards. The hosue came back on the market. Another house was bought by a "speculator", enlarged and then resold.
Get him to first work out if it even needed permission:
Is there any proof of the age of the extension? ISTRC that a structure that has existed for more than 4 years does not require PP. With exceptions, of course, conservation area etc. I may well be wrong. To prove the age there may be existing paperwork relating to the construction of the extension. Google earth can be useful in situations like this. OTOH. Person buys a house for cash. Give, say, a month for the transaction to be completed. I think a month would be very optimistic these days. Three months after the purchase the owner emigrates to SA. I stand to be corrected but surely (1) the person would have had some inklings of the intention to emigrate, (2) unless already a SA passport holder this would have taken more than three months and finally (3) he didn't have the house surveyed. Put these words in the correct order: asmellirat
hth
His original intention was to keep the house as a UK 'base', and rent it out. Later, he bought a small business in SA and needed the capital to develop it. No rats involved. Apart from possibly his solicitor. He is, shall we say, a bit impulsive, but this mess isn't really of his making.
Tangentially, does this PP stuff apply to the construction of a steel-reinforced concrete base garage/workshop in a suburb back garden (not mine!)
Even if it's not been developed they've suddenly realised there's lots of issues relating to short ownership properties.
Like people realising it is next to neighbours from hell, or doesn't have PP for extensions etc.
In three months?
I would go with this too.
When you buy a house the only people who see it are you and any surveyors you instruct. The solicitors don't know whether any bits are new - it is up to the person buying to be aware and if they are not sure ask and get answers in writing.
Within 3 months he's decided to marry, emigrate and buy another business. He is more than impulsive.
I haven't given the exact timescale of all these events. He did intent getting married and emigrating before he bought this house, though. But none of that makes any difference.
Perhaps you'd explain just how the average person is expected to know if any extensions etc to a house are legal? Surely that's the solicitor's job?
No. That's the surveyors job!
The solicitor doesn't see the property. They don't usually even see plans.
They can do searches with the council but they'd only indicate any permission sought or successful and any building regs paperwork. All that is available to the general public anyway.
You're supposed to get a surveyor to look at the property so they can point out any issues with it - such as the roof falling off - although most surveys only come with disclaimers "get an expert surveyor in field X to look at the X" - but a surveyor should have noticed the property had an extension.
How new is it? How does the buyer know it's an extension? Do they have original plans from somewhere?
Normally a person would look at a street of virtually identical houses and then wonder why the one they were viewing had an extra bit.
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