Unregistered land

[Isthiscorrect]

We are selling FiL house. He passed away in April and it's being sold via Probate which has been granted.
Anyway solicitor has just come to us and said part of the garden is unregistered. She does have all the info we have which includes a sale document and receipt dated 1969 at the time the house was purchased by FiL. Any idea what this means for us and for the purchaser? Can't ask solicitor as email sent after clog of business. Just curious because gov.uk suggests 16 months or longer!

It means it's not registered digitally with the land registry. Shouldn't be a problem if you have the documents (the 'deeds' as it were) proving ownership. Normally it would be registered to the new owner as part of the sale.

@Svalberg thanks. I must admit I was a bit shocked when gov.uk said 16 months.

Usually the buyer's solicitor sends off all the deeds after completion and has it registered then, so as long as you have all the deeds it shouldn't cause a delay.

We had a section of our garden which wasn't in the deeds when buying our house. The then owner had to get it registered in his name before he could sell it to us. Delayed us 2-3 months. Wasn't a big deal, just had to wait for it to get to the top of the pile at land registry.

I bought a house and there was no fence between my house and the one next door. I put a marker down and the next door neighbour said I was taking his land. It turned out that we both "owned" a triangle of land and there was another triangle that neither of us owned. We agreed to a new boundry line and I went to the land registry and they sorted it out in half an hour (They did comment that it was very unusual for neighbours to agree about such errors)

That must have been a while ago? It's taking a lot longer than 2-3 months at the moment

This happened to me when buying a house about 10 years ago. It didn't hold yhe purchase up.
My solicitor got the vendors to take out insurance (while it was sorted). It probably took about 9 months after completion for solicitor to sort out. I seem to remember that because part of the land was then being purchased separate to the house I had to buy it for a £1.

I’m a solicitor dealing with unregistered land a fair bit as part of my job. If the buyers insist it’s registered pre- completion then your solicitor can ask HMLR to expedite the registration process. This can be done quickly - about 3 weeks last time I had to do it. Your solicitor would need to submit Heads of Terms of the sale.

You should also bear in mind the possibility that if you don’t have the deeds you can still claim title by way of adverse possession (squatters rights) but you’d be awarded possessory title which would probably impact on value on that part of the whole.

@MiddayLibrary Thank you for this info. I'm not sure what's happening as we haven't heard back from the solicitor yet.
We don't have title deeds but we do have a document showing the land and the a receipt for the purchase dated the same day (1969) as the purchase of the house.
Good news to know it can be expedited.

We recently tried to buy a house which needed a correction at the LR. They quoted 17 months despite a sale being depeon it so we were forced to withdraw.