Help - buying a house with unregistered land

[Newusernameaug]

Has this ever happened to anyone?

The house we’re buying has a strip of land at the front, the front steps, that’s unregistered.
My solicitor doesn’t want to proceed but the sellers lived there less than a year and have produced everything they have.
This has now stalled for 2 weeks and otherwise we’re ready to complete.

It's not uncommon. Can be overcome by taking out insurance (not very expensive) against anyone rocking up and claiming it's theirs after you've moved in / bought.

After something like 7 years you can apply to register it as yours anyway.

Am surprised neither solicitor has suggested this though.

I had to look into this as was potentially going to buy a whole house with unregistered title!

We had something like that near us although the owner was known. They called it a ransom strip!

No idea what happens if the owner isn't known.

Ok thanks that’s reassuring. Had a Google but it’s mostly about the whole lane being unregistered.

My solicitors seem to be picking up every little thing and stalking the sale, I can’t work out why but it’s driving me mad!

I would listen to your solicitor. They don't flag for no reason. Have a good chat with them. Who knows what might happen. You might get a telegraph pole erected in the strip of land for example.

We have this at the front and back of our house that we bought in 2022. The seller took out an indemnity policy and wrote a letter stating they had never experienced an issue with accessing the property.

Just to say as well I guess it depends how big the strip of land is, in our case it's just about 1m by 5m of verge and the bit of path from road to our gate so no one is realistically going to claim that because you couldn't do anything with it.

We had this with a parking area. The sellers had to produce something called a 'statement of truth' about their use of it and also an indemnity policy.

A solicitor is there to give you legal advice about Property Law not just progress your purchase . It’s not just about form filling . Listen to them and ask them to explain the risks regarding this piece of land .

Thanks everyone, I’ve sent another email to my solicitor this morning with some questions and suggestions as above.
I can’t reach my solicitor via phone and they always take 2-4 days to respond to anything.
They don’t make any suggestions or explain the risks - they just keep pushing the questions back to the sellers and expect them to magically come up with new answers.

We had this on our last property & had an indemnity insurance against it which the sellers paid for. All fairly straightforward.

Like previous posters, I am surprised your solicitors haven't suggested steps to overcome this. You can go through a process to register the land to your property, and I am reasonably sure there is insurance you can take out to cover the risks.