"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 18:12:55 GMT, "Cicero"
wrote:



==============
My suggestion was prompted by one very bad personal experience. I bought
a
new house several years ago and because it was new (with no searchable
history) the searches showed none of the items I cited. When the Deeds
were
prepared by the vendor a covenant was inserted which permitted several
other
properties access through my property. This wasn't a problem at first but
some of the other owners assumed that 'access through' gave them a right
to
park on my property. Legal action was necessary to confirm my right to
prevent people parking on my property and of course this resulted in very
bad relations with several neighbours. When I sold the property (as
quickly
as I could!) the purchaser's surveyor did indeed ask me personally about
the
situation and actually measured all the boundaries to confirm their
location. The purchaser was made fully aware of the situation and had the
result of my legal action to prevent any repetition of the original
problem.
My solicitor was not very helpful and only acted under pressure from
myself.
He had either missed the covenant at the time of purchase or hadn't
considered it worth his time to explain it to me. Although my experience
may
be rare I think it is worth asking both solicitor and surveyor about such
things. If it doesn't concern the surveyor he will surely not be upset
about
being asked and may actually know about such things despite being outside
his terms of reference.

Cic.



Now I know where you are coming from and I see the point.

I purchased a new property some years ago, built on some farmland and
there had been a public footpath which would have gone through several
of the properties. Because the area around had been developed
anyway, there had become no purpose for the footpath anyway it was not
that important, but an insured indemnity had had to be put in place by
the builder to cover it. This all came out in the searches as well
as being volunteered by the builder.

It seems though, that in your case, the solicitor didn't do his job
properly.

The original point was whether surveyors have a part to play and I
didn't see that they did in terms of titles, covenants and the like.
How would the surveyor know unless you ask him to do a Land Registry
search as well? it's another opinion, but you can equally get the
entry from the Land Registry yourself for nominal cost.





.andy

==================
My solicitor was highly recommended but proved to be really quite
inadequate. We learn by bitter experience! In fact I would have asked the
questions myself if I'd known which questions to ask and from whom. That's
why I suggested that the OP should ask his surveyor for any relevant
information - the worst that can happen is that he will say that he doesn't
know anything. The more questions we ask the less likely we are to meet
unpleasant surprises such as I the one I got. I'd never heard of a covenant
in this context and certainly wouldn't have been able to ask any questions
about them. As you say, the Land Registry, is a useful source of information
but in my case there was no registry information because the house was a
new build. We put a lot of trust in our solicitors and when things go wrong
it's usually because we trusted the wrong one. That's life!

Cic.