Should we worry about Covenants on the property title.

[BroglieBoy]

We are buying a freehold property in England and the Title search came up with the following:

"The Transfer to the proprietor contains a covenant to
observe and perform the covenants referred to in the Charges Register
and of indemnity in respect thereof."

A Transfer of the land in this title dated 17 June 1977 made between
(1) ABC Limited and (2) XYZ contains restrictive covenants.

We checked with the conveyancing solicitor but we are not clear what this means.
Is this very common? Should we be worried due to this? Should we avoid such properties? We plan to extend the property and the conveyancing solicitor mentioned to us that we need to take permission from 2 parties.
one from the Planning permission and second form this covenants.

Anyone had any experience with such restrictions? Any advise?

"I’d never buy a property with covenants"

Tell me you've never bought a house without telling me you've never bought a house 🤣🤣 @ElevenSeven

Good Morning,
Many Thanks to everyone for their valuable feedback. Much appreciated. I have now received the details from the Solicitor and they are given below.

We plan to make some extensions to the property after we buy. I hope none of the clause mentioned in the document will cause us any problem.

Get your solicitor to explain that in plain English. It is what you pay him for. If he won't then that is very worrying and you should find another one.

Ok that’s quite simple, any extensions, new outbuildings , drainage etc. for 80 years you need to seek permission from abc limited, so you need to understand who they are, are they still in existence, is there a contact? Do they still wish this to take place?

it’s been 46 years so possibly they don’t exist or don’t care any more and would happily discharge this.

so you need to go back to the solicitor and ask about the covenant holder.

It’s fairly simple and the solicitor has told her what it means they need to seek permission from that company if they wish to extend.

what they now need to do is find out who they are and if they still exist , or care or would just null this.

Who is “abc limited” op, we can maybe help,

I beg to differ. For some people wordy pieces of text end up as blah, blah, blah and no matter how many times they read it they cannot understand it. OP is asking us to translate it so I'm assuming they can't, but they have a solicitor whose job it is to understand and then translate it to their client in plain English, but they haven't. Surely a solicitor would find out who/if they exist/able to nullify it as part of the process too?

If you can read and understand legal documents fully then that's an awesome ability. Truly.

Sure, I mean it’s fairly basic English with basic intent. But sure, agree.

I’m currently selling a property with covenants. My solicitor sent me the relevant part of the deed highlighting what the covenants were. I had to sign to say they hadn’t been broken. There was one - keeping the boundary walls and fences in good repair - that I couldn’t sign because the front wall had been removed by the previous owners. It hasn’t affected the sale at all.

You cannot know until you know what the covenants say. It might be not keeping chickens, it might be a restriction on land use or it might be access. Speak to your solicitor. If it is something like access you can often take out an indemnity policy (ie if something like an old footpath used to cross the land and was moved by a developer).

The documents will be available in the solicitors pack .. speak to them to find out what they say, you win't get any sensible advice until you have the information you need.

How ridiculous, you are completely over generalising. It could be a really minor issue. Obvs for your friend it is a more difficult covenant.

Not ALL new houses. Some.

I remember my parents looking at a house in the 1970's. It had a covenant which said you couldn't peg washing out on a Sunday. With 3 school aged children in school uniforms they didn't proceed.
We have the no livestock, no commercial vehicles and not fencing the front garden covenants on all the houses on our 30 year old housing estate. Lots of front gardens are fenced/hedged and vans are very visible on driveways. The builders went bust years ago.
We also bought a smallish piece of land at the side of our house. The previous owner put a covenant on it that said we couldn't build anything on it. We had it changed(before signing) to not constructing a separate dwelling so that we could still build an extension if we needed to.

We live in a Victorian back to back and have a covenant about not creating noxious smells. Afraid DH has broken that one many times...

I have asked the solicitor to check few things such as the process to get approvals/permission to carry out extensions and also if the fee of £2.50 is still applicable for each request made for permissions.

They can be anything, from stuff about fences to allowing neighbours' electricity supply to pass over the land.

@Voulez23 many of the original Victorian restrictive covenants would have been put in place by the landowner (often landed gentry) who sold whole chunks of land off to individual builders to build streets, lay out new areas of towns etc. These old families often had family trusts which means that there may still be people around now who have inherited the right to enforce these covenants. However, in more recent years this area of law has moved on and now, unless the person who has a right to enforce the covenants still owns land in the area which would be detrimentally effected by the breach of covenant you would struggle to get a court to enforce the breach. In practice, if there is an old covenant that has been breached you can buy defective title indemnity insurance whereby you produce the deed which created the covenant to a specialist insurance company and tell them what the breach is (ie building built without consent or alterations done etc) and they will provide an insurance policy which protects the owners should anyone come out of the woodwork to say they have the benefit of the covenant and wish to enforce. The premium depends upon how likely they think it is that anyone will come forward.

@Ilovemyshed I said 'all modern estate houses' you would be very hard pushed to find any developer of a new estate who doesn't impose restrictive covenants! I have been doing this job for 33 years and have never come across one.

Although as others have said most of them are ancient, like not keeping swine and brewing ale, keeping chickens is a thing these days......

Mine has covenants that prevent me parking a caravan. DSs has them to say he can’t run a slaughter house on his land. Guess which is the Victorian house!

Always a tricky call. Because your enquiries may wake a sleeping giant. There have been cases where a home owner did the right thing, woke up the owner of the covenant and then they went through the estate checking everything and causing mayhem. Though I don't think you have much choice with an extension

Agree with everyone else, we have bought new builds with restrictive covenants about not parking lorries on the drive, and our current property in Scotland was built in the 1960s and has covenants about not keeping pigs/goats/sheep in the garden.

It really depends what the covenants are.