Buying house on unadopted road

[Beanzandcheeze]

Hey guys, currently in the process of buying a house it’s on a 7 year old ish estate and has a management company. However now the searches are back the solicitors are asking for a 278 agreement, if the roads were never meant to be adopted would this exist? Sols don’t give me much info and have said they cannot determine from the title that there are sufficient covenants in place for the maintenance of the estate roads by the Management Company, and that they may need to report to my lender. Is this a typical enquiry or something I should be worrying about? So nervous something is going to go wrong and that we will lose the house as we love it and the location is perfect! TIA x

In my experience unadopted roads tend to resemble a war zone😶

The road is pothole free and to be fair looks brand new… might resemble a war zone in years to come though haha

You might find you'll have to pay for road maintenance in years to come.

I recently pulled out of a property purchase on an unadopted road as as far as I could see, there were no guarantees of the annual charge not rising significantly in the future to pay for the maintenance of the roads. Many new estates have an agreement in place for the roads to eventually be adopted by the council, but if this is not the case, I would definitely ensure there is adequate provision and that you will not be drawn into increasingly large annual service charges.

There's an unadopted road on a route that I regularly walk, well I call it a road but it's really just a collection of crators and sinkholes, everyone in the road drives a large SUV type vehicle to cope with all the craters but of course these heavy vehicles make the craters worse.

Ours is unadopted but the council maintains it, apparently the paperwork got slowed due to covid and needs to be rewritten