Genealogy Chat

Does anyone know the current situation re. deeds?.... I have read here that some are being thrown away.... Are they needed in order to sell a property, ( owned, no mortage)?..... Can the vendor or buyer keep them?

I have mine, or should i say,i had mine.the solicitor has them ready for house sale now, usually they are kept in a safe place like the bank or solicitors strong box

Sorry Jess, I didn't make myself clear. May I keep them if I sell the property? Gwyn

I have the deeds for a property that was sold in the 1960s, when my father acted as executor for a neighbour. Presumably, they would only be needed in cases where title could be proved in no other way.

So yes, I'm fairly sure that you can keep them.

house deeds are now kept on line so if you do lose the originals, there is always a copy available.

Could photocopy them.

When we recently finished paying off our mortgage we got the deeds from the building society. Lots of people told us to keep them really really safe. However our solicitor advised us that if the property was registered with the Land Registry the deeds are no longer required. We still have them and I have been quite tempted to do some genealogy on the long list of former owners of the land and then the house when it was built. Anne

I guess it's just me being sentimental really. ... My mother has recently died and her bungalow, birthplace of my brother, sister and I will have to be sold. Ours is the only family to have lived there since it was built in 1936 and so I was hoping to 'hold on' to part of it's history. Gwyn

Well, Gwyneth, going on the info I was given it would seem you could well be able to keep them yourself. Definately worth asking the solicitor to register the property with the Land Registry and then having the deeds yourself. Anne

I have my deeds although I still have a mortgage. I think that many of the building societys etc decided to scan the orginals and return paper documents to owners because of the high cost of storage. As someone else said there is a database at the Land Registry. My house dates from @1760 and the paperwork fills a large folder, multiply that by millions of deed documents and you can understand the storage problem. I do hope to work on the info one day just as soon as I have finished the family tree.

What I think you may have heard about is the Land Registry Act 2002. After Oct 2003 (yes a year later) the Land Registry stopped issuing Land Certificates and Charge Certificates for all registered land and properties. They said the data held online was sufficient to prove ownership. So any Deeds held for registered properties are now just 'historical documents' and have no value, which is why many have been binned. About 85% of titles are now registered so it does apply to most properties.

It is the deeds of houses that have changed hands fairly recently (since about 2000) that I have seen, in connection with local history of the village where I live. The current occupiers were given all documentation on their properties, and this has included wills which refer to the property and at least 1 affadavit, swearing entitlement to the land as having belonged to the chap's father. I was told it was something to do with the information being recorded on computer and stored centrally, so solicitors no longer needed to store it. I assume it is happening gradually - my own deeds are still with my solicitor. Jay

If your solicitor is charging you to store your Deeds then it quite likely you are paying for a service you don't need. If your property is registered the Deeds have no value as they do not prove ownership. Might be worth finding out if your property is registered, you can do it on the Land Registry website. www.landreg.gov.uk You can find out for FREE if your property is registered, click on the blue 'Land Registry Online'. Your house name or number, and postcode are all that's needed. Don't get ripped off by some websites, they try and sell you the info for about £20, it's £2 from the official site if you want to download information.

Thank you for your input. I've checked online and the property is not registered, presumably because there has never been a change of occupancy. Any further advice still welcome.

I switched mortgage company a couple of years back and promptly forgot that the original company were holding the deeds for me - when I remembered a couple of weeks ago I rang the new mortgage company - they told me the deeds should have been exchanged from one company to the other automatically when the mortgage changed over -but that it didn't matter who had them as everything was done electronically now so not to worry! Hope you get it sorted!

My dad died 2 years ago leaving a house that is registered with the land registry & free of mortgage. He told me he had hidden the deeds but omitted to tell me exactly where. They haven't come to light yet (I've cleared the loft). The Land Registry told me I didn't need the deeds to sell the house but some estate agents & solicitors are still very cagey about it. I'd like to see them for curiosity, even though the house isn't that old & our family have been the only occupiers since it was built.

Some solicitors are binning them, others are giving them to Records Offices as historical documents, still more are letting the property owners have them. If you want to keep them, then you can.

I had no idea. We paid off our mortgage in 2003 and the paperwork which was returned to us only included details of the mortgage, remortgage and a plan of our bathroom. I thought that was odd but I duly took these 'deeds' to the bank and deposited them there. (I was of the belief that without them you wouldn't be able to sell or prove it was yours) I feel so stupid now. Still with the £15 a year I can now save I can buy the title register and plan from the Land registry AND have enough left over to get a certificate!!!!!! (Guess Nat West are going to loose out on the deal)

Hi – A word of warning regarding the retaining of house purchase correspondence by Solicitors. When we bought our property some 20 years ago the solicitor was adamant that the 'sight line' shown on the plans which went across ours and next doors front garden must not be breached in any way. To grow or build across this 'sight line' would institute a road hazard to motorists because they would now have to negotiate a 'blind bend'. Because my next door neighbour put in a Planning Application for an exention to his property, I needed to refer back to my solicitor regarding boundary lines and original Planning Consent with Conditions. I was told that the practice didn’t hold files for longer than 10 or 15 years due to lack of storage space. This effectively stymied my search for the said Planning Consent with Conditions. The local Council also didn’t have a record of the Conditions – I was told that ‘the file must have got lost in the move’ from one Council premises to another, but don’t they always! Nothing is currently showing up on their computers. The information kept in that file is crucial because at the moment I am objecting to a another Planning Application by the neighbour which will effectively breach this ‘sight line’, but without proof of the ‘Planning Conditions’ I and a number of neighbours will probably lose by default. Should the Application go ahead then a permanent hazard to road traffic will be instituted. Had I realised that all correspondence on the house purchase would be disposed of at some point then I would have taken the file into my possession on the basis that I could always take it back to a solicitor if necessary. It is my view that clients should be asked by solicitors if they wished to retain files prior to disposing of them. Hope that all this makes sense. Rita