Overcoming Legal Complexities in New Build Purchases : Success in Milton Keynes

A good case for future property lawyers : a particularly complex new build PX completed in record time through collective effort and teamwork. If I say the px had solar panels, a flying freehold,an extension without consents and an Article 4 direction you will understand what I mean ! I’ve written a 1 min read article about it here #Teamwork #NewBuildConveyancing #Conveyancing #HousingMarket

Recently, we had the opportunity to assist clients with the purchase of their new home in Wavendon, Milton Keynes. This particular case involved a part-exchange arrangement and was filled with the kind of complexities typical of new builds, but with added challenges. The property being exchanged had issues including solar panels, a flying freehold, an extension built without consents, and was affected by an Article 4 direction. These factors made the conveyancing process particularly intricate.

With solar panels we have to anticipate that the buyers solicitor is going to need to know if there is a solar panel lease because if there is one of those there’s a lot of conditions that lease has to contain and if it doesn’t have the appropriate clauses in it the property may not be mortgageable, which would affect our sale. In this case we were fortunate in that the panels were owned outright and after some nudging the client found/obtained all of the necessary paperwork for the solar panels so we were ok.

The flying freehold was one of those common situations where part of the property went over a passageway ie a walkway from the front of the house to the rear. The clients bedroom was over the passageway but they didn’t own the land underneath ie the passageway. This brings issues as there were no rights of support etc in the deeds. The clients had an indemnity policy in their possession from when they had bought the property, the amount of cover was insufficient because the house value had increased . So we uplifted the policy and luckily for us the builders solicitor was happy with that.

It was a similar situation with the extension that had no consents: indemnity policy for breach of covenant and lack of planning / building regulations consents got us through that one .

?The Article 4 Direction could have been a really difficult one to get past depending on the terms of the direction but luckily for us this Article 4 only prohibited changes to the property that constituted change of use of the property falling within the houses in multiple occupation class of the schedule to the Town and Country(Use Classes ) Order1987, so the extension was not “caught” by it. We just had to obtain a copy of the direction from the council and again, luckily for us, the council had an on line database of documents that we could access.

Despite these hurdles and a demanding deadline of just two and a half weeks from the file landing on my desk to completion, we worked together and got it through. The tight timeframe, the financial intricacies of the deal and the clients' busy professional lives in Jersey, required some coordination and commitment.

Completing this transaction was a significant achievement, made possible through everybody pulling together as a team. Seeing our clients' happiness as they received the keys was rewarding. Their appreciation, reflected in a great review, was a testament to the hard work and commitment of the team, thank you all involved.?