Registering a property at Land Registry

[funnelfan]

My parents bought their house in 1963. Recently mum got a letter from a speculative company pointing out the house was not registered on the Land Registry and offering to assist. That has spooked me that she may be vulnerable to fraud, so am looking into whether it is worth registering now in mum's name. I'm fairly confident in dealing with officialdom and looking at the website at https://www.gov.uk/registering-land-or-property-with-land-registry/register-for-the-first-time I would be prepared to do it myself, but would appreciate any thoughts on whether it would be better to get a property solicitor involved:

*Very few documents exist from purchase, just some correspondence with estate agent proving Dad paid a deposit in 1963
*It looks like the house was bought in Dad's name only as the estate agents letters were addressed to him only.
*Parents were married already when house was purchased.
*Mortgage paid off in the 1980s, deeds were held by building society that has long since been swallowed up by mergers etc so no idea as to their whereabouts.
*There was a Ground Rent charge on the property that I persuaded Mum to pay off last year.
*Dad died several years ago. No probate applied for as they had a simple, joint will leaving everything to each other and then to DB and I when the survivor died, so advised probate not necessary at this point.
*Likely house will need to be sold in the next couple of years (probably for care home fees if mum still with us)
*I have lasting power of attorney for legal and financial matters.

Any thoughts?

You can get the deeds online for £2.50. Also you can set an alert on the property if someone searches like said ‘dodgy company’.

My reading of the situation is that you cannot get deeds online, nor set an alert for the property, if it is not registered with the Land Registry in the first place.

I am preparing a form K15 to request a search for the Land Charges Department, but am slightly hampered by the fact they request payment of search fees by cheque, and I've no idea where my cheque book is...

I think you need to get a solicitor involved here. First registrations are not simple, and things are further complicated here by the lack of documentation and your father’s passing. I am a solicitor but not a property lawyer, and this is raising a lots of flags for me that it would be far from straightforward.

I also would see a property Solicitor, they can prepare the appropriate forms and look into the land registry situation online. We had this situation when my in laws died, our Solicitor had to prepare land registry forms in our names as Executors, before we could complete on the house sale.

Thanks @MikeWozniaksMohawk and @Mindymomo - while we're not looking to sell imminently, it sounds like it's one job we could do now that would make things easier down the line.

I've just found a letter from the solicitor that Dad used for the purchase, and Google tells me they are still in business 60 years on! I suppose it would be too much to hope that they still have any information on the transaction in their archives, but worth a phone call on Monday anyway.

I had to phone their helpline on Thursday, extremely helpful and they immediately sent a summary of what needed doing by email.

@funnelfan you are correct registering the property does enable you to use the free fraud prevention options.

As a pp said a first registration is complex and I would suggest using a solicitor to assist you and your mum. You may find your Mum has to do a statutory declaration if you can’t find the deeds.

Before you contact a solicitor collate all the paperwork you can find. Normally when a mortgage is redeemed the deeds are returned to the owners. Try to find these as they are key. It is worth contacting the building society to see if they still hold the deeds - unlikely but worth an email.

@Premiumbondbaby They definitely don't have the deeds. I remember mum telling me that they kept an account open with the society and the society would then keep the deeds in their safe. The building society was the Leicester, which became Alliance and Leicester which became Santander, and is not in the same physical place of the original Leicester office. I'm a bit doubtful that Santander could help, but stranger things have happened I suppose.

It will be extremely difficult to register without the deeds as the deeds act as proof of ownership for unregistered land. Without them the Land Registry may only register you with possessory title rather than title absolute which will have an impact on value and the ability of a future purchaser to get a mortgage. Therefore it is well worth pressing Santander for the deeds and either way this should be sorted out now rather than waiting until the property is sold.

Are you sure you have been through all the paperwork your mum has? I'd go through everything again. Otherwise is there any possibility they have a safe deposit box anywhere?

You said this company contacted your mum to say it's not registered. Have you checked yourself? Was that company itself legit or an attempt to pull your mum into being scammed?

@funnelfan definitely check with Santander.

I also meant to say please make sure you liaise direct with Land Registry, there are unscrupulous companies that add a premium for free or low cost services.

What I’m hearing is that yes, registering mums house is an important thing to do; that we should use a property lawyer as it could be tricky; and that we need to find what happened to the deeds.

To cut a long story short, I’ve been doing my parents paperwork for a while. I thought i had everything as I’ve got all the bumpf for the insurance, utilities, bank accounts and pensions etc. No unexpected bills or unusual correspondence over the years.

Since dads death and mums dementia diagnosis I have gradually and discreetly gone through every drawer and cupboard in the house. As the family historian I’ve been delighted as there’s been treasure troves of old photos and letters! But no deeds. There is “dads cupboard” that I currently can’t get to in the garage as there is a wall of Stuff in front of it for Reasons. DB and I didn’t think there would be anything important in there, but it’s the one remaining place where there may be a clue to the fate of the deeds. Sounds like a job for next weekend.

I thought I'd update. I have tracked down the deeds - they are in the central archive of the building society who inherited their mortgage. I have also spoken to a solicitor who was lukewarm about doing a voluntary registration at this stage, in no small part because currently it's taking over a year for the Land Registry to process these. They said as long as we hold the deeds then not being registered is no impediment to a future sale - the conveyancing just follows the old process based on having paper deeds. In any future sale, the obligation would then be on the buyers to complete the first registration after sale completion.

At the moment, I'm leaning towards doing nothing. Mum is in her 80s, in declining health and theres a reasonable chance we'll be moving her to a residential care home in the next year or so. I don't want a sale to be held up because the registration is stuck in the Land Registry backlog.

A good update OP. I dealt with my aunt's estate a couple of years ago and her house was unregistered. Like your parents, my aunt and uncle's mortgage was with a building society who became Santander and Santander were very helpful, and efficient, in locating and supplying the deeds.

I'm no expert but I think dealing with registration while dealing with the sale of the house, when that becomes necessary, is the easiest way as it will form part of the conveyancing tasks. It will need to be registered to be sold I believe - my aunt's had to at least.

It will need to be registered to be sold I believe - my aunt's had to at least.
The solicitor I spoke to was quite clear that that was not the case - at least in our situation. They said that issues mainly arose because newer solicitors didn't know the old processes, as it is now uncommon to sell an unregistered house. They said I needed to engage "an old hand that's been round the block a bit" when it came to dealing with any eventual sale.

I purchased a property in 2021 that was not registered it cost a bit more, but the process of sale went through the old way and then the solicitor registered the property for us. It cost a couple of hundred pounds more, but I now have the original deeds with all the fabulous history of our houses secret past.

We had this with DMIL's property, bought in joint names in 1954, never registered and no-one important (solicitors etc) had been informed of FIL's death in the mid 80s. I was keen to get the property registered, but the attorneys didn't want to do anything with the house that DMIL would not understand, so it was left.

We had been told it would not make any difference to a sale, but as it turned out, the first purchasers would not proceed unless it was registered. We started the process, but there was an issue with the boundary which delayed things a lot and then they pulled out anyway. All in all it took us nearly two years to sell the house.

No, it's not compulsory, but I now regret not having done it when we had plenty of time.

Your experience is the kind of scenario that I had at the back of my mind when I thought it would be a good idea to go ahead now.

i wonder why your original purchasers insisted it was registered before the sale went ahead. Do you know if there was a specific concern which made them insist, or perhaps their solicitors didn’t want to do it themselves after the sale? The solicitor I spoke to was quite clear that there is no requirement to do so, but maybe it’s dependent on the solicitor/conveyancer of the purchaser being willing/able to do deal with the situation.

I qualified in 2005 and I’m increasingly noticing other solicitors can’t handle unregistered property. But so long as your solicitor knows how to bat back silly questions, you’ll be fine.

@funnelfan the original purchasers were not British nationals, they were buying their first house and using licensed conveyancers from the other end of the country. I suspect there was an issue with staff there not being familiar with the first registration process and also that their clients were on a budget and did not want to pay the substantial first registration fee.

Add that to the fact that FIL built his garage several inches over the boundary according to the original plan and we had a recipe for disaster!

I work at a Conveyancing company and I am currently on maternity leave so not sure on current times but when I was at work last year, first registration of unregistered deeds was taking over a year.

If you or your family decide to remortgage or sell, then this would trigger first registration and this would have to be done before or on completion. It depends on the circumstances as to which it would be.

Thanks, that does sound stressful!!