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Property in English Law


The G Man

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When I bought (with a mortgage) my flat last year the seller's mortgage company held onto the deeds for a few months, then sent them to me - I got the impression that everything is done digitally at the land registry, so the hardcopies don't matter so much these days.

 

And good luck finding a place that still offers safety-deposit boxes to store them!

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No, they stay with the mortgage lender until paid off. You can get photocopies if you want though.

 

As above.

 

The mortgage company owns the house & deeds until you pay your mortgage off. Even then its all done electronically these days.

 

When I paid my mortgage off 3 years back I asked for the deeds and they just sent me an electronic print out of them to prove that I now owned the house and that was it. Back in the day before electronic records the deeds were much more important and effectively proved you owned the house. Solicitors & banks used to offer to safe keep them for you if required for a nominal fee.

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No, they stay with the mortgage lender until paid off. You can get photocopies if you want though.

 

Bank kept mine until I'd paid the property off. I did need to see them after I'd lived in the house for about 8 years as I knew there was a 25 year guarantee on the damp course which had failed. Sadly for me it didn't do me any good as the company that had done the damp course had been liquidated many years before. Actually thinking about it the bank didn't hold the deeds at the branch but at their mortgage HQ, I had to wait a few weeks and there was a fee too. This would have been in 1986, things may have changed since then.

 

Pete

Edited by JetSet
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Nowadays if your property is relatively new title deeds are just held electronically by the land registry.

 

The conveyancer or solicitor would have registered a legal charge in favour of the lender

 

You can view a pdf version by doing a land registry search, costs about £3

 

If your property is older the lender will usually hold on to the deeds until mortgage is repaid.

Edited by Piranha
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Nowadays if your property is relatively new title deeds are just held electronically by the land registry.

 

The conveyancer or solicitor would have registered a legal charge in favour of the lender

 

You can view a pdf version by doing a land registry search, costs about £3

 

If your property is older the lender will usually hold on to the deeds until mortgage is repaid.

 

Kind of. What I found when I moved house was that if the house has not been bought or sold since 1990 then the land registry might not have any details of it on their electronic system. Any house which has been bought/sold since then is all held electronically.

 

The problem I had was that the house I was buying hadnt changed hands since it was originally built in 1970. However the surrounding houses had changed hands since 1990, so all their details and land boundries were on the land registries system, but my new house wasnt. And sods law the boundries and maps in my original deeds didnt match up with what the other house owners had claimed. This caused all sorts of hassle between the lawyers and the land registry who then would have to contact all the other house owners and dispute things etc. In the end I just said fine, lets go with the land registries version - so I lost a bit of land but the whole conveyancing wasnt delayed.

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