Has anyone come across this kind of covenant?

[geminiflanagan]

Hi all. We are midway through purchasing a semi, built in 1971 on an estate. We've finally been sent a whole pack of information, and there is a covenant in there which

A) restricts us from doing any building work within 5 years of the property being transferred to us, unless we contact the original building company and obtain their express permission (with a fee associated) - this is in addition to any local planning permissions.

B) requires us to keep a small section of front garden to the side of the driveway maintained as grass only. We had been planning to extend the quite narrow 70s driveway, so this will scupper those plans!

We are moving from an area where we pay an estate charge, so we were looking forward to just living in a normal house without any silly restrictions! Are these kind of covenants normal? Has anyone had to deal with anyone similar?

Place we are in, built in 1973 had/has restrictions on it, one being, you cannot replace your windows without permission from the construction company.

The company is still in existence and I certainly didn't get any permission from them to do it. Nothing has ever happened.

My parents had restrictions on their house when they bought it. Couldn't put an extension on without permission from the construction company. They put the extension and conservatory on without it. Again, nothing happened.

Our property (and the others in our road)has some odd covenants - one of which being the number of trees we have to have in the front and back gardens. The construction company has gone out of business and there's no one to enforce it. Which is just as well, as on the north facing side of the road, the required trees keep dying, so people have mostly chopped down what's left.

Urg, I hate covenants.

Personally, one of my deal breakers buying a house is covenants like this.

Firstly, you'll have to be satisfied the covenants aren't currently broken. If they are, then you'll just get indemnity insurance.

Secondly, are you intending to do work that goes against the covenants? Looks like you are - so you have options:

1. Try and get them removed
2. Try and get permission
3. Do what you want and hope for the best

It can be expensive, stressful and time consuming to do 1 or 2 and 3 is a risk.

Depends how much you want the property and how feasible 1 or 2 would be (are they contactable, how quick are they to reply, what are their fees etc).

And of course they could say no. In which case you can't do what you want, and you wouldn't be able to get indemnity.

It may be unenforceable. Is the builder still trading? Was the five years from new rather than subsequent owners. These clauses are often t9 maintain uniformity while building is still happening and fir a period after.

Covenants like this are generally just in place to ensure the estate looks neat, tidy and uniform whilst they are still building houses. Check that they haven't been broken, get an indemnity policy and crack on.

I second getting an indemnity policy, your solicitor that's handling sale should be to advise/be able to sort this very quickly and easily, think ours cost less than £100.

Just get an insurance policy.

Don’t contact the sellers, neighbours, the original builders or your aunt Sue with any questions or comments about the covenants: if you talk to anybody but your lawyer then your insurance policy could be invalid (because you’d have alerted people to the existence of the covenant, making it more likely it gets enforced).

Vast majority of these covenants are forgotten about and never enforced, loads of them would not be legally enforceable now anyway.

Reply to the lawyer saying thanks for the info, pls get us a quote for insurance.

Our 1990's built house has some of these covenants. As a PP said, they are mainly designed to make sure that the development remains 'uniform' whilst the developers finish off and sell all the properties. We got our solicitor to get amendments on ours before completion (we're the original owners). Any alterations we've done (which were 20 years ago now) we did get permission from the builders. The builders have now gone bust so consent wouldn't even be possible now. I remember one of the covenants was "no commercial vehicles to be parked on driveways". I can assure you that a number of neighbours ignore that and nobody bats an eyelid. I'm pretty sure most of our neighbours didn't get consent for extensions from the builders and some of these houses have changed hands in recent years - so clearly not a major problem.
Your Solicitor should be able to clarify the position - it's very common.

Thank you - for those of you saying get indemnity, do you mean to cover us for any work we do that would technically breach a covenant? We are happy that nothing has already been breached by prev owners, our only concern is being able to do what we want to do (primary drive extension, single story extension, garage rebuild & attach to house).

I think we would be inclined to crack on but obv the issues would arise if & when we go to sell. Others on the street have definitely made changes, but obviously there is no way of knowing whether they did approach the company (still trading) for permission, unless we ask them.

Sorry for the questions - going back to solicitor today so trying to get the right questions etc to ask in the email!

You would only need an indemnity policy in place if covenants had already been breached.

You cannot get indemnity cover for future plans.

If I were you, I'd research the original developer and see if they're still around.

If they're not around/untraceable then you could decide to crack on with your plans. Without permission, obviously this would be a breach of covenant.

Then when you come to sell, your buyer would be advised to get an indemnity policy. They're very cheap. Very common.

Our covenants included keeping the front door the same colour and not removing hedges in the front garden.
We now have a pale pink door and white gravel and a much lighter living room

Ours say no fences etc higher than 4 feet. Hmmm.
No commercial advertising (which means no for sale boards).
There were a couple of others.
The house was built in the 1930s.
No-one seems to take a blind bit of notice.
I was thinking about it recently as we may decide to move.

Also - look around the estate and see if other front gardens have been converted - it should be obvious if this covenant is rigidly enforced or ignored

We are in a row of 10 ‘old estate houses’ which were workers house for a large estate house. We have covenants that state ‘ no building on the side of the property’ our side wall of our house is the boundary line. Our next door neighbour showed me ‘his plans’ for his extension which was right up to our house and said it would be better if they could attach it to our house ..better for him but not us! We used the covenant to stop him building his side extension (covenant owners issued an injunction) The covenant owners still own some of the houses and have offices nearby. These houses are nearly 100 years old and the covenant is adhered too and the houses all maintain their original old style frontage and haven’t been modernised to look like grey boxes. If you want a modern looking house buy a new one, don’t buy an old house and ruin it. My neighbours a dick anyway before this happened!

We have similar covenants in place.

Any building work needs to be approved by the original builder (out of business) and we cannot make material changes to the front landscaping.

Solicitor advised that we could ask the company that bought out our builders but it's probably just easier to get an indemnity policy after the extension (ask for forgiveness, not permission she said!)

With regards our landscaping, we share with neighbours either side. Neither were aware of the covenants so we'll extend our drive a bit the one side and the narrow grass the other side is being turned into a flower bed. Both neighbours are happy with this and it's not really the kind of street that you could lose all the greenery etc anyway so no real harm done.