Expediting the (first time) registration of a property

[toni1602]

The house that I am buying has never been registered as it has been in the same family for 90 years. My solicitor advised that it is registered by the current owner before purchase in case any issues arise. They have applied for the registration to be expedited. Does anyone have any experience of how long this process actually takes? Their solicitor will not deal with enquiries until the registration is completed.

what do you mean by registration?

Sorry, registered with land registry.

If it's been expedited with the Land Registry then they should look at it within 10 working days. They will then raise any requisitions etc. with the applicant's solicitors before completing the registration. Sometimes there are no requisitions, sometimes there are a few. But I would expect the solicitors to hear something within 10 working days of their expedite being approved.

Sorry, should have said - I am a property lawyer

It was pretty quick for us-we had to have it done regarding a sale as well. Certainly within ten days.

My in-laws house has never been registered and they have no interest in doing so. Would there be problems if it remained unregistered until they died (hopefully for a long while yet), would it be easy to register as part of probate?

Hi, I’m just interested why this has happened. I didn’t know a property could be missed on the land registry like this?

If it’s any help my parents house built in the 70’s has just been registered for the 1st time.
They handed everything over to a Solicitor who made the necessary application to the Land Registry on their behalf in July 2022. They were warned at the time that the Land Registry had a huge backlog to deal with and that they were unlikely to hear anything for well over 12 months. The Solicitor wasn’t wrong - it was a week short of 18 months before the confirmation of registration was received

Thanks everyone. Fingers crossed it's as quick as some of you say.

It's not that it's been missed. It hasn't been sold in the time period from when registration became compulsory in my area. Therefore, there has been no legal requirement to register it.

gotcha! thanks for writing this. I had no idea this was a thing. Hope it gets sorted soon and sounds like it should

The house that I am buying has been through probate and is being registered now that it is being sold.

@cupcakesarelife property registration didn't become compulsory everywhere in England and Wales until the 1990s, and even now it's only on a disposition of land. There's lots of property which is still unregistered - if you sell unregistered land then the new owner has to register it after completion of their purchase. Often buyer's solicitors will ask the seller's solicitors to register it before the sale, as it will flush out any issues there may be with the title.

If you submit a voluntary application for registration it's currently taking in excess of two years for the Land Registry to process. You can only ask them to expedite it for one of two reasons, either it's impacting another application or the delay is causing financial hardship. You have to provide evidence of the reason you are asking for an expedition, such as a sales memorandum from an estate agent or a letter from a solicitor confirming the property is being sold or mortgaged.

For some reason lost in time the bottom of my yard/garden is on a separate title (so were/are all my neighbours). And no one holds this title. My buyers requested this be resolved and despite it being expedited we are now in month four. The LR in their wisdom decided to check if any of my neighbours objected to me keeping my yard. Given I have occupied the plot here for over 30 years there are effectively no grounds to object. So what should have been a simple paper exercise has taken 14 weeks and counting.
OP when my buyer's solicitor queried the title my solicitor offered a sworn affidavit and an indemnity policy, which my buyers now wish they'd accepted. Might be worth checking if that's possible with yours.