On Reading the Small Print by Debbie Bennett
Oh, Asda - what were you thinking? So we’re buying a flat. A bit of speculative property development, plus our house is on the market – and while I don’t think we could squeeze ourselves and all our stuff into the flat long term, it may well serve as storage and as a temporary stopgap to save having to possibly rent somewhere while we find and buy our next house. Anyway, all the paperwork comes through from the solicitors and we spend an evening ploughing through land registry documents. It’s an ex-local authority flat and the freehold is still held by the Housing Trust, which isn’t a problem – except that clearly nobody at the Trust has ever actually looked at the property and figured out where the doors are … The result of which is the vendor not actually being able to sell us the entire flat at all, but only 9/10 of it, since the front door and hallway are not theirs to sell as they are not marked on the leasehold title held by the land registry! Cue the vendor’s solici...