If you thought buying your first property was stressful, just wait until you go to sell that property. A certain amount of ‘faffing around’ is normal in any property deal, especially where mortgage contracts are concerned, but there are some that are just ridiculous. Read on if you wish to avoid them.
Flammable Cladding on Leaseholds
In the UK, for example, there are over a hundred high-rise flat blocks in England alone which local councils, to save money, equipped with highly combustible cladding. This was fine, until June 2017, when a tower called Grenfell in West London caught fire, resulting in the deaths of 72 people and hundreds more being made homeless. If you are a leaseholder of such a flat, then it’s a bit of a problem, because this makes it virtually impossible to sell. The reason for this is that mortgage lenders will not touch such properties even if they wear armor and wield a cattle prod. In England, the only way around this is to produce what’s called an EWS1 form, where a chartered fire safety engineer can establish that the cladding has been removed. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of such engineers in the whole of the UK. Regardless of which side of the pond you live on, the lesson here is to get onto your building management company and make sure no hidden traps are lying dormant within your lease, because the sooner these can be diagnosed, the easier it is to resolve the problem via your management company, as it can take years to sort.
Restrictive Covenants
These tend to turn up in most property deals, and are usually harmless in and of themselves, as they are only ever an issue in practice if one of your neighbors is a) aware of them and b) has a problem with what you’re doing, which is exceedingly rare. Generally speaking, yes, you can get away with contacting that roofing company, regardless of what the restrictive covenant says, provided your neighbors are cool with it. The problem, however, is when your solicitors decide to turn a molehill into a mountain. This is because solicitors, in their defence, are tasked with safeguarding your legal and financial interests to the best of their ability, which sometimes they can get a little carried away with. The take-home here is learning when to say to your solicitor, ‘it’s fine. I’ll get an indemnity policy’.
That Buyer
Then, there are those buyers, (sigh), the ones who can ‘totally’ make good on that deposit, ‘absolutely’ have a mortgage in principle, and ‘wouldn’t even think’ of trying to renegotiate the sale price a week before completion after agreeing to the old one before you took the property off the market to waste months on a deal that ultimately can only fall through. Or there are the ones that die, right when you’re in the middle of the chain, at which point, several property deals can fall through simultaneously. The lesson here? For goodness’ sake, vet your buyer and make sure they’re in a good buying position. Don’t ever sell your property to someone just because they seemed like a nice guy, whatever you do.
