Residential Property

Our clients include families, couples, individuals and property businesses. Every year, we help hundreds of clients buy or sell houses and flats (including buy-to-let properties and new builds), and remortgage their properties, both freehold and leasehold.

The properties we deal with are spread across the whole of the UK though many of our transactions are in and around Wimbledon, Epsom, South West London and Surrey.

For brief information on our costs in relation to residential property and conveyancing, please click here.

For detailed information on our services and costs in relation to residential property and conveyancing, please click here.

If you buy or sell a property with someone else, you will need to set out how each of you owns the property. A combination of increased property prices in the UK, in conjunction with a lack of affordable housing, has resulted in a number of potential purchasers having to pool resources from family members and/or friends in order to finance a property purchase.

Legally, you can own a property as “joint tenants” or “tenants in common”.

Where you own a property as joint tenants, you share equal ownership of the property. If one of you dies, the property automatically passes to the other. This is often the way married couples or couples in civil partnerships hold their property.

Ownership as tenants in common means each person owns a separate interest in the property. This can be 50:50 or any other agreed percentage. It means that an owner’s share passes with their estate when they die, either as provided by their Will or legal intestacy rules.

It is not unusual when a couple or two (or more) friends buy a property together that they contribute unequal amounts towards the purchase price or repay unequal amounts of the mortgage. In these circumstances, it is advisable for the parties to enter into a declaration of trust. This will set out what share of the property each person owns and how the property should be divided if they decide to sell. We can advise you on this and draft the declaration of trust for you.

We can act for you both if you are mortgaging your property for the first time, or re-mortgaging your property.

We are on the panel for the majority of high street lenders, meaning we can potentially act for you, as well as the lender, thereby reducing your legal bill.

Sometimes a re-mortgage is required if you decide to transfer the equity in your property. This is the transfer of a share of the ownership in a property between joint owners.

You will need to obtain the prior approval of your mortgage lender (if you have one) before a transfer of equity takes place. We can assist you with both a re-mortgage and/or transfer of equity.

A long residential lease can become difficult to sell and mortgage if the length of the term remaining on the lease is below a certain number of years.

If you own a leasehold property (most flats are held on a lease), you may have the right to extend the term of your lease. This is called a lease extension.

There are two routes available to tenants considering extending the term of their lease: the “informal route”; and the “formal” route. The law allows tenants to apply for a lease extension provided they have owned the property for at least two years, which is considered to be the formal route. The informal route is where the leaseholder simply contacts the landlord to try and negotiate terms to extend a lease.

Similarly, the owners of flats in a building may have the right to join together to buy the freehold of their building. This is a known as freehold enfranchisement or collective enfranchisement.

Valuation both in the context of collective enfranchisement and lease extensions is a specialist skill and specialist advice from a surveyor is recommended at an early stage of the process.

We act for both landlords and tenants in these complex areas of law and can advise you throughout the process.