My wife and I intend to remortgage our flat in Snettisham with TSB. We have a son approaching twenty who lives with us. Our solicitor has asked us to disclose any adults other than ourselves who lives in the flat. Our lawyer has now e-mailed a document for our son to sign, waiving any legal rights in the event that the property is repossessed. I have a couple of questions (1) Is this document specific to the TSB conveyancing panel as he never had to sign this form when we bought 4 years ago (2) Does our son by signing this giving up his rights to inherit the property?
First, rest assured that your TSB conveyancing panel solicitor is doing the right thing as it is established procedure for any occupier who is aged 17 or over to sign the necessary Consent Form, which is purely to state that any rights he has in the property are postponed and secondary to TSB. This is solely used to protect TSB if the property were re-possessed so that in such circumstances, your son would be legally obliged to leave. It does not impact your son’s right to inherit the apartment. Please note that if your son were to inherit and the mortgage in favour of TSB had not been discharged, he would be liable to take over the loan or pay it off, but other than that, there is nothing stopping him from keeping the property in accordance with your will or the rules of intestacy.
Why do I have to pay up front when it comes to conveyancing in Snettisham?
Where you are retaining lawyers for conveyancing in Snettisham your lawyer will ask you put them with funds to cover the the cost of the conveyancing searches. Generally this is requested to cover the fees of the Local Authority Search. When the down payment is payable against the sale price then this will be asked for immediately before exchange of contracts. The closing balance that is due will be payable shortly before completion.
The Snettisham conveyancing lawyers that I recently instructed on my house acquisition in Snettisham have without warning closed. I chose them because I had to have a solicitor on the Nationwide conveyancing panel and my preferred Snettisham lawyer was not. I gave my credit card details for them to take one hundred and fifty pounds for searches. What are my options?
If you have an estate agent involved then let them know straight away so that they advise the vendors that there may be a slight delay due to reasons beyond your control. Hopefully they will be sympathetic and urge their lawyer to send a new set of papers to your new solicitors. You should appoint new lawyers that are on the Nationwide conveyancing panel and notify the lender. If you have paid over any money, it will hopefully be held by the SRA as money in an intervened firm's bank accounts is transferred to the SRA. Then, the SRA or the intervention agent looks at the intervened firm's accounts to work out who the money belongs to. To claim your money you will need to contact the SRA. If the SRA cannot return money you are owed from the firm's bank accounts, or if they can only return part of the money, you can apply to the Compensation Fund for a grant. Your new solicitors should be in a position to assist.
Is it necessary to take out insurance to protect me from financial exposure to chancel repairs when purchasing a house in Snettisham?
Unless a prior acquisition of the house took place after 12 October 2013 you could expect lawyers handling conveyancing in Snettisham to remain recommending a chancel search and or chancel repair liability insurance.
I used Stirling Law a few years past for my conveyancing in Snettisham. I now require my file but the law firm is no longer operating. What do I do?
You should contact the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) to assist in tracking down your conveyancing files. They can be contacted on please contact on 0870 606 2555. Alternatively, you should use their online form to make an enquiry. You will need to provide the SRA with as much information as possible to assist their search, including the name and address in Snettisham of the conveyancing firm of solicitors you previously retained, the name of conveyancing solicitor with whom you had dealings, and the date on which you last had dealings with the firm.
Am I best advised to choose a Snettisham conveyancing practitioner who is local to the property I am purchasing? I have an old university friend who can carry out the legal work but her office is over three hundred miles drive away.
The primary upside of using a local Snettisham conveyancing firm is that you can visit the firm to execute paperwork, present your identification documents and apply pressure on them if necessary. They will also have local insight which is a plus. However it's more important to get someone that will pull out all the stops for you. If if people you trust instructed your friend and on the whole were content that must outweigh using an unknown Snettisham conveyancing solicitor just because they are based in the area.