House deeds delay covid

[NIsense]

Hi. I'm selling my house to buy another. 6 weeks down the line and my solicitor has just told me that the deeds for the house I'm buying have still not been released by the bank - Santander in this case. Is anybody else experiencing delays for the release of deeds like this? Maybe it's just the Santander. My solicitor says the delay is caused by Santander staff working from home because of covid.

Help is appreciated.

Has the house not been remortgaged/sold/bought since 1990?

In any event I would try giving Santander a call as their customer and give them a forceful nudge. That’s not ok. We have been living with Covid long enough that these issues should be ironed out.

Is the house unregistered?

It took us 3 months to get FiL’s deeds from Barclays, one month to get them to admit they held them, one month to locate them in deep storage, then a month to bother to send them to us. We waited until we knew they were on the way before putting his house on the market.

I have just been told the house Im buying is a repossession. Delay in deeds releaswe could be something to do with that. Finding this really annoying!

A lot of lenders don’t release the deeds now until the loan has been paid off
Some don’t even hold the deeds
Your solicitor should be able to get copies from the Land register
If title not register solicitor has to get heavy with lender,they will just ignore standard letters