Financing was a Kafka-esque nightmare
I own you, you own me
In a nutshell, we both own the whole property, while each of us has a lease for the part that we actually consider our own. In other words, each of us is each others and our own landlords! This is clearly a legal bonanza, because all sorts of stuff needs agreeing. Before I moved in, the last two letters between our lawyers concerned the placement of our respective garbage cans. The sort of thing you would have thought any two adults would have been able to resolve without paying £40 a letter for.
You couldn’t make this stuff up!
In the case of our re-financing, the laywers acting for the mortgaging company managed to string out their costs thus:
1) They wrote a letter to the owner of upstairs to which he had to respond, confirming that he had no objection to my re-mortgaging. Why on Earth would he? It’s none of his business! He lives in France, but they wrote to him here, so that slowed things up.
2) They wrote a letter to my wife, to which she had to respond, confirming that she had no objection!!!
3) The wrote a letter to me, to which I had to respond confirming that I had no objection to myself re-mortgaging!!!!
4) This is the best part, so bare with me. The terms under which the owner of upstairs and I lease our properties from each other are that we each have to pay each other £1 a year in rent. The more astute among you will note that our rents cancel each other out. They’re a token of course, commonly known as “peppercorn rent”. Indeed, we can arrange to have the rents commuted to one peppercorn each way if we so desire, with, of course, the “assistance” of our lawyers.
Needless to say we haven’t bothered, but astonishingly, the mortgage company’s lawyers wrote to the upstairs owner (naturally at the UK address instead of where he actually lives) to get him to confim that I wasn’t in arrears with my rent! Aside from the fact that the most I could have been in arrears at the time was £9, the incredible thing is that anyone with half a brain would notice that simply by neither of us ever doing anything I couldn’t possibly be in arrears!
The whole process took some 5 months from the time the loan was originally agreed. Which was a good job really, because it was during that time that we found out about and decided that we wanted to install an English Rose Kitchen.
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December 10th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
[...] One of the last phone conversations in which my lawyer engaged me – with the clock ticking, naturally – was to ask whether I knew there was a railway line running some 300 yards from my house. I responded by informing him that there was a dotted white line down the middle of the road, and that I was charging him £80 an hour to research the fact. Oddly he didn’t get my point and further padded my bill by exchanging a series of letters (price £50 each) with the vendor’s solicitor regarding the positioning and usage of our rubbish bins (that’ll be garbage cans on t’ other side ot’ pond). You can read more solicitorial lunacy here. [...]