When to change land registry?

[CoffeeAndChoccies]

I got married 3.5 years ago and changed my name. DH and I bought a house nearly 6 years ago together (50-50 ownership) and so it was purchased in my maiden name. I updated my name to my married surname on the mortgage back when we first married (along with other legal bits) but it didn’t occur to me about the Land Register. We are now looking to sell this property and buy another at some point this year (upsizing). Very early planning stages, so have time to get things sorted. No solicitors or estate agents involved yet so no one to ask for official advice. Do I need to change my name to my married name on the land registry before we sell, or can that be done as part of the process at the time we decide to sell/have found a property to buy? Online has differing advice - some places say it’s not compulsory to change and can be done as part of the process when/if you buy and sell later. Others say it should be done before to avoid delays with a sale later…

I don’t want to cause unnecessary delays or risk a sale falling through as the kind of houses we’re looking to buy don’t come up for sale in our area very often, so we need to be in a position to act fast when they do. Any advice welcome! Thanks

Question for your solicitor but I suspect that as long as there's evidence that the name difference is legitimate, ie your marriage certificate, you don't need to do anything.

My daughter bought a house with her boyfriend before they married and sold it after without difficulty.

Don’t do it now. There are delays of a few months to process those sort of applications. It’ll be fine to be done as part of any later application.

Thank you! This was what I’m worried about, as we’d like to start the process of getting our house up for sale and start viewing properties soon, and we can’t do that if I’ve submitted the land registry application and things are up in the air. I just don’t want it to come up as a red flag during the sale and cause huge delays/issues when we could have sorted it.

You don’t have to change it at all. When we sold they just took a copy of our marriage certificate to prove it was me and it went through as it was.

It’s common OP. Don’t worry. Take an original marriage certificate to your solicitor so they can take a copy. Your buyer’s solicitor will then send it to the Land Registry when they register the change in ownership.

I only realised this year that I hadn’t updated the Land Registry docs on our house after we got married, when I needed to show the documents for a different reason.

We’ve been married 22 years 😳!

I think it’s something that people very commonly forget to do OP, and easily resolved as part of the sale process as PP’s have said. (It’s free to get it changed though, if you did want to do it.)

My previous and present house remain in my maiden name.