Proper packs

The debate regarding property transfer packs is beginning to show why changes are necessary.

To illustrate how much better it is to supply all the information about a house sale up front and after it has been checked through by the seller's solicitor, here is a recent case on which we were instructed by the buyer.

This was a 1930-built maisonette with an extremely defective lease; it had just about everything wrong with it in technical terms, and it was at the time occupied by elderly owners who had been in residence for a number of years.

On receipt of the contract and papers we pointed out to the seller's solicitors that the lease was unacceptable.

Title good leasehold we could probably change, mutual enforceability and insurance obligations perhaps we could overcome with a deed of variation.

It may have been that the freehold reversion, which had only just been recently acquired, would make an approach to the freeholder easier for a request to deal with the bankruptcy provision.

The point is the seller's solicitors sent the lease out without comment.

The deal has fallen through.

Our client has lost a survey fee and the elderly sellers have lost a buyer.

That case should never have happened.

If a property pack of information had been prepared in that case the seller's solicitors would have identified that the lease was defective and attempted to correct those defects or, at the very least, identify them as problems when the papers were delivered.

This old idea of hiding behind caveat emptor no longer has any room in today's consumer society.

If the boot had been on the other foot in that case we would have worked hard to get those defects resolved and, meanwhile, have made sure that nobody wasted time and money in attempting to sell a property to which the title was defective.

That's what pre-packaging is all about.

Brian Marson, Marsons, Bromley, Kent