‘Buyer Beware!’
Posted on 10th March 2024
As your Conveyancing Solicitors in Preston advise all clients, when selling your property there is a duty on the seller to disclose any relevant information about a property they are selling. Matters that need to be disclosed include any disclosable overriding interests, details of works carried out during your ownership such as extensions, and disputes with neighbours, among other things.
However, there is a principle in the Conveyancing World known as Caveat Emptor which means “Let the buyer beware”. This essentially means that the buyer should make the necessary investigations of the property and title prior to exchanging contracts, and setting the completion in stone.
This is where your Conveyancing Solicitors in Preston come in. Our role, as your nominated Conveyancing Solicitors, is to investigate the title of the property you are purchasing, and ensure the property is sold with good title. However, as the principle above suggests, the buyer should also make their own enquiries, usually by way of Conveyancing Searches and a property survey, to ensure they are satisfied with the condition of the property themselves.
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Responsibilities of the Conveyancing Solicitor:
Searches
Searches are a set of enquiries which are sent out to various authorities, such as the local authorities and the water authorities, and ask a standard set of questions designed to provide detailed information about a property being purchased. Your Conveyancing Solicitors then review the results of the searches and will raise any necessary enquiries thereon. If any issues are revealed, your solicitors will accordingly report to the buyer and make them aware of such issues.
Enquiries
Enquiries are a set of questions which your Conveyancing Solicitors ask of the seller to provide detail on certain points the buyer would not be aware of prior to purchasing the property. These can be unique to each transaction, depending on the documentation provided within the Contract pack, the search results, the buyer’s queries, and the survey results. Your Conveyancing Solicitors will review these points and use them to form a set of queries raised with the seller’s solicitor. We can continue to raise enquiries until we are satisfied with all potential issues relating to the property. These are very important as they may affect whether the buyer proceeds to purchase the property, if any issues are revealed.
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Responsibilities of the Buyer:
As per section 3.2 of the Fifth Edition of the Standard Conditions of Sale, which are entered within the Contract for sale, ‘the buyer accepts the property in the physical state it is in at the date of the Contract’. It is, therefore, important, that as the buyer you also attend to the following:
Inspection
You should, of course, have personally inspected the property prior to committing to the purchase. This is not an obligation of your Conveyancing Solicitors, however, our team would advise that you inspect the property, on more than one occasion, notifying our team of any defects which may require further enquiry, as well as ensuring you are happy with the property and to proceed with the conveyancing process.
Survey
Again, this is not on an obligation of your Conveyancing Solicitors in Preston, however, we would always recommend that a survey is carried out. This will help obtain physical information about the property, for example if there is any damp at the property, which your Conveyancing Solicitors can then raise the necessary enquiries in relation to. This may also detail any works that would be required at the property which would need rectifying before Completion, or may lead to a renegotiation of the purchase price.
By taking the above steps, the buyer can be made aware of any potential issues they would not necessarily be aware of prior to purchasing. Therefore, if there are any issues, these can be resolved, or the buyer may decide not to proceed, in order to avoid any problems after Completion of the matter. Once Contracts have been Exchanged and the matter has Completed, the buyer cannot then revert back to the seller on issues that should have been identified beforehand, as ownership has now passed from the seller to the buyer. This particularly highlights the importance of the phrase, let the buyer beware, and the obligations on the buyer as well as your Conveyancing Solicitors in Preston.
For more information on buying a property, or any other conveyancing query, contact our Conveyancing Solicitors in Preston today on 01772 783314 or by email to property@mglegal.co.uk.
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Tagged as: Conveyancing, Solicitors in Preston
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