Conveyancing in Oxfordshire - The Facts

Oxfordshire has been a sought-after residential area for many years, with its attractive towns and villages offering both a wide variety of housing, and an equally wide range of Conveyancing issues.

Apart from the city of Oxford, other major towns in the county include Banbury, Bicester and Didcot. If you have a property transaction anywhere in the county, a proactive Conveyancing Solicitor is advisable, offering you Fast Conveyancing services to make the transaction as quick and as straightforward as possible.

Commuters choose to live in Oxfordshire due to transport links into London, while for others it provides peaceful town and village properties in rural settings, especially in the lovely Cotswold countryside. The city of Oxford is of course an old-established centre of learning, and is now the centre of a thriving area with many residential areas.

Selling? - Points to ponder

When selling your home in Oxfordshire, it is recommended that you instruct a Conveyancing Solicitor as soon as you put the property on the market.

Most people ask an agent to sell their property, and then wait until the agent has found a buyer before instructing a Conveyancing Solicitor. This means that a quote has to be obtained and accepted, and the Solicitor will then have to carry out the ID checks, which are now essential. Once the Solicitor has done that they will need to prepare and send a draft contract and other documents to the buyers’ Solicitors, but before they can do so they have to obtain various documents and information from a variety of sources.

The home owners’ Conveyancing Solicitors will need to send their clients the usual property information forms to be completed so that they can be forwarded to the vendors’ Solicitors. On checking the replies, it may be found necessary to get copies of other documents such as planning consents or NHBC warranties.

The Oxfordshire Conveyancing Solicitor will also obtain details of the property title, and contact any existing lender for information about the mortgage. While copies of registered land titles can now be downloaded from the land registry straight away, it is often necessary to obtain copies of other documents filed at the registry. These are not always stored electronically, so the registry has to send copies by post. Where the title is still unregistered, the original title deeds have to be located; they may be held by a mortgage lender.

For leasehold properties such as flats, the Conveyancing Solicitor will want to obtain management information from the landlord as such information will be required by the other side.

Finally the Conveyancing Solicitor will check that the person from whom he has received instructions is the registered owner of the property. It might be that a house is being sold by the executor of a deceased owner, or where the owner has given a power of attorney, and a copy of the grant of probate or other document is required.

If you instruct a Conveyancing Solicitor at the same time as putting the property on the market, the solicitor can be carrying out this work so that as soon as a buyer is found the contract package can be sent immediately to the buyers’ solicitors, saving delay in the Conveyancing process.  A Fridaysmove Conveyancing Solicitor will be happy to discuss this with you.

Buying in Oxfordshire

You can save yourself time on a house purchase if you contact a Conveyancing Solicitor as soon as you start looking. Although there is less work that Solicitors can carry out for buyers before they have located a property, they still need to carry out ID checks.

It is surprising that Conveyancing Solicitors often receive sale details from sellers’ agents indicating that they will be acting for the buyer, when the buyer has not even contacted them beforehand or even asked for a quote. This often leads to time being wasted while the Solicitor tries to contact the client to get instructions. People may assume that the firm which acted for them on a previous transaction will still be prepared to act, but that might not necessarily be the case; for instance they might already be instructed by the seller.

Once you have instructed a Conveyancing Solicitor to act for you on your property purchase, he or she will usually receive a sales memorandum from the vendors’ agents. This will set out details of the property, the price, the parties and their solicitors. The agents may also send a copy of their sales brochure. The solicitor will also require the draft contract and other documentation from the sellers’ solicitors.

Some Conveyancing Solicitors will not take any further action until the buyers’ mortgage offer has been issued. This is to avoid a situation where a substantial amount of work is carried out, but the transaction is then aborted because the mortgage survey is unsatisfactory and/or the buyer cannot obtain a mortgage.

Some specific legal issues for Conveyancing in Oxfordshire

Houses in a Conservation area/Listed buildings
As may be expected, there are many parts of Oxfordshire covered by conservation areas, and for many this will be a benefit, ensuring that the “look” of the area is preserved. Purchaser’s solicitors will carry out a local search to reveal whether the house is in such an area, and advise their clients accordingly. The search will also state if the property is a listed building.

It is important to check if any works have been carried out to affected properties, as special planning consent is required. Consent would be required for such things as installing replacement windows or erecting a satellite dish on the front of a house, and the financial implications for failing to obtain necessary consents can be severe – the council might for example require unauthorised replacement window frames to be replaced with frames in the original style appropriate to the building, an expensive proposition if custom-made wooden frames are necessary.

New-build houses
New housing developments may be large estates or small infill developments, but in either case a Conveyancing Solicitor will have to carry out a variety of checks to ensure that clients end up with good title and no legal difficulties will arise when they come to sell.

The Solicitor acting for the developer will prepare the contract and transfer documents and supply these, together with the plot plan, to their opposite number. Although such documents will normally be in a standard form for the development as a whole, variations may be required for individual plots, depending on the layout of the estate. The homebuyers’ Conveyancing Solicitor should therefore check that the transfer document contains all the provisions appropriate to the plot being bought, and also that the plan correctly shows the area the client wishes to acquire.

Conveyancing Solicitors will check that arrangements are in place for roads and drains to be constructed and completed by the developer and that they will be publicly adopted and maintained. However modern estates are now usually laid out with houses grouped round small closes, which will not be incorporated in the public road network after completion. The buyers’ Conveyancing Solicitor will therefore check and advise on the legal arrangements, especially checking that there are necessary legal rights of way.

On many modern developments sellers arrange for management companies to be set up which will take over the maintenance of common landscaped areas and private roads after construction has been completed, so buyers will have to be informed of their obligations to contribute to the cost of such work.

Property in country locations
As a largely rural county, Oxfordshire offers many properties in beautiful countryside. For these the Conveyancing Solicitor will need to check that the house has the benefit of connections to mains drainage and other services. Although this is invariably the case for urban buildings, many country homes are served by septic tanks or other means of drainage, which may be shared with neighbouring owners. Access is often by means of a private lane, so Conveyancing Solicitors need to check and advise clients that there are proper legal rights and what maintenance costs may be likely.

Tree Preservation Orders in the county
These orders are common in rural Oxfordshire, and can be a thorny issue for potential buyers if overlooked. This account of Conveyancing in Oxfordshire contains a detailed breakdown of the considerations.

Flats, apartments & leaseholds
Many town-centre properties are flats, which may be bought on a long lease. Where there are two or more separate dwelling-units within a building, some form of leasehold arrangement is usually encountered. It is difficult in English law to enforce the performance of positive obligations (such as carrying out building maintenance) against successive owners of freehold property, whereas a lease creates obligations between landlord and tenant which can be legally enforced.

When acting on the purchase of a leasehold flat or apartment, the Conveyancing Solicitor will check and advise on the provisions of the lease. In particular he or she will check the length of term remaining – many leases were originally only granted for terms of 99 years. Mortgage lenders now usually require that a substantial length of term is still remaining when lending on a property, so if the term is close to the limit, the buyer require advice as to whether the term can be extended. Sometimes the seller will be required to initiate steps to serve a statutory notice for a Lease Extension on the landlord, so that the benefit of this can be assigned on completion. However the client will need proper advice on the implications if such a notice is served. A Fridaysmove Conveyancing Solicitor will be able to advise on all aspects of this for purchases in Oxfordshire.

Flat owners also need to know what level of service charges are levied by the landlord, if they carry out regular property maintenance. This could include payment for lighting and heating common areas, and gardening. Where a flat is in a larger block, such charges can be significant, so the building manager will be asked to provide copies of the accounts for previous years, as well as an estimate of likely costs for the current year. Enquiries will also be made as to whether any substantial works, such as exterior decoration or roof renewal, are planned for the current year, in case the buyer might receive an unexpectedly high demand after completion.

Conveyancing Solicitors will make arrangements on completion to apportion the rent and service charges, so that each party only ends up paying for the period when they have owned the flat. In some cases it will be agreed that one of the Solicitors will retain a sum of money to cover outstanding liabilities because the final amount of service charges for any one year will not be known until the year-end accounts have been completed.

Houses in areas affected by Flooding & Environmental concerns
Conveyancing Solicitors acting for property buyers in Oxfordshire will carry out environmental searches which will indicate if a house is in an area where there is a significant risk of flooding. With the River Thames and other rivers flowing through Oxfordshire, it will be important to ascertain if a property has suffered flooding in the past, or may be at risk in the future. Insurance premiums can be significantly higher for affected homes, which can affect future saleability and therefore value.

Although Oxfordshire towns are not especially known as industrial areas, various industries have been carried on in the past, especially the Morris car plant at Cowley near Oxford. Where such industrial uses have ceased, land may have been redeveloped for housing, and if that has occurred it is advisable to know that appropriate remedial works have been carried out to remove any ground pollution. An environmental search will indicate any previous land use, as well as any potential sources of pollution within the vicinity of a property.

Unregistered property titles

The Land Registry operates a system of registration of land titles in England and Wales. It was originally set up in 1875, but for many years registration was on a voluntary basis only, and few Conveyancing Solicitors thought it worthwhile to register clients’ titles. Following changes made to the registration system in 1925 the government brought in compulsory registration in some areas, but this was not extended to the whole country for many years.

Compulsory registration is only necessary when a relevant property transaction, such as a sale or mortgage, takes place. It is still not uncommon to find houses being sold which were purchased by the current owner when the title was not registered. In such cases the seller will have to show title in the traditional way, by producing his title deeds.

The deeds will usually consist of documents, normally called "Conveyances" by which title was transferred from one owner to another. They would also include any mortgages. If there is a current mortgage on the house, the title deeds will be held by the mortgage lender, but otherwise the deeds should be in the possession of the seller.

When an unregistered property is now sold, the buyers’ Conveyancing Solicitor will have to check that the deeds show that the seller has owned the property for 15 years or more. It may well be that the seller’s title deeds include documents going back for many years – in some cases hundreds of years – but the older documents are not normally required unless later documents refer back to them. For example, the Conveyance to the seller might state that the property is subject to some restrictions set out in full in an earlier Conveyance, so it will be necessary to see the earlier document for details.

After completion of the sale, the buyers’ Conveyancing Solicitor will have to apply for first registration of the title. The Solicitor should therefore have checked that the unregistered title is all in order, and that it will be acceptable to the land registry.

For all Conveyancing work throughout Oxfordshire, a Fridaysmove Conveyancing Solicitor will provide a first-class service, giving knowledgeable advice on all aspects of Property Conveyancing for buyers and sellers.