Indemnity

[Weddingbells6]

I don’t understand this, does anyone else? I am buying a house which has a garage built at the back in the garden. You can’t access the garage from the front of the house because the previous owner extended the house to the side. It is accessed via a road (gravel) between the house and the house next door (not attached obviously) the road is owned by the council and I assume they could sell the land should they want to. You can’t access access the garage via the back garden but obviously couldn’t drive your car through the house.

The seller doesn’t want to pay for the indemnity (£200) but I’m not actually sure what the indemnity even is, does anyone know? And surely £200
isn’t much to pay if you know the buyers need it?

I have emailed my solicitor but she is out of office and it’s bugging me so I’m looking for advice so I have a better understanding for when they get back to me. Maybe people go halves?

It sounds like an absence of easement indemnity policy.

An easement is a legal agreeement you have with a landowner to be able to use their land to access your property. If you don’t have such an easement in place, the landowner could potentially decide to stop you using their land to access your property.

The indemnity policy covers your legal costs to fight your case if this ever happened.

Your solicitor will be able to clarify.

Usually you need it for the mortgage, it's a scam from the insurance industry as they never get claimed.

We had to have an indemnity for our house. It was a new house accessed via a small private lane with no registered owner.

We had to have an indemnity to protect our right to use the lane to access the house. I think the indemnity policy was only about £200 also and our vendors paid for it. We couldn’t have bought the house otherwise as we couldn’t guarantee being able to access it so up to vendor to pay. Never had an issue in the 12 years we have lived here.

Indemnity insurance is rarely a good resolution and will very rarely do what you want it to. If you don't have the right to drive across that land to access the garage then an Indemnity policy is not going to achieve much, there is no power that can be invoked to force the landowner to give you such a right. The policies rarely pay out and have a myriad of ways you can render them void by eg talking to anyone official about the situation. The best you could hope for would be the policy paying out the drop in value of the house if by the time you sell the access to the rear has been blocked off, but the likelihood of the insurers agreeing to pay out in such a circumstance is very low. It would be better to simply reduce your offer to take into account that what has been marketed as a garage is really just a large outbuilding with no legal vehicular access. And be prepared to walk away.