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Monthly Archives: August 2011

Highest London rent yet shows up differential in property sales

By Residential Department | Published: Aug 30,2011

News that a billionaire from the Middle East has agreed to take on the UK’s most expensive residential lease is yet another sign that London property sales are forming a micro market different from elsewhere in the country.

The rent on the four-bedroom penthouse in Knightsbridge, London is £55,000 a week, adding up to £2.86 million a year, and putting further pressure on prices of homes in the capital.

With the cost of becoming a home owner continuing to move beyond the reach of many first-time buyers, the market for rental properties in popular areas of the city is also becoming more expensive and difficult for those seeking reasonable rented accommodation.

There have been press reports of gazumping and potential tenants losing out to rivals who provide larger deposits or offer other inducements to landlords to win the right to live in a convenient flat at an inflated rent.

Although the level of rents in London is exceptionally high because of demand, some properties in other parts of the south east of England, such as Brighton, can also command expensive rents due to the parallel cost of buying a house.

It is good news of course for the property owners, many of whom have buy-to-let homes bought with costly finance in recent years and who are now seeing a better return on their investment than at the start of the current recession.

Residential conveyancing solicitors who specialise in this branch of property sales with an efficient and proactive service are able to advise potential landlords on procedures to maximise the financial benefits and minimise complications.

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Residential conveyancing solicitor’s advice on neighbour’s building claim

By Residential Department | Published: Aug 30,2011


Residential conveyancing solicitors across England, including those in London and Brighton, have been studying the implications of a court decision which may lead to a couple being forced to sell their home to pay damages to a neighbour.

The couple which was sued had bought their former council house under the right to buy scheme but were unaware when contracts were exchanged that four months before they became owners the woman living in the adjoining house had been injured by a piece of guttering which had fallen from their property.

The injured woman subsequently made a claim for breach of duty against the couple because of the continuing pain in her neck, shoulder and knee, resulting from the alleged negligence of maintenance of the house.

Last year, the high court found in favour of the claimant and the couple was ordered to pay a total of £20,250 in damages and costs.

Now though, the couple, from Prestwich, near Manchester, say they will have to sell their home to raise the money since the woman’s lawyers refused the suggestion of payment by instalments.

It is the duty of residential conveyancing solicitors prior to a property sale to check for outstanding claims or potential problems relating to previous ownership before advising clients whether the difficulties are sufficiently serious to merit withdrawing from the sale or achieving a high enough reduction in the purchase price to cover any remedial works or possible court case.

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What’s the outlook for property related professional negligence claims?

By Professional Negligence Department | Published: Aug 27,2011

It is not only the likely demise of no win, no fee claims which is set to cause a boom in property transaction-related professional negligence claims over the next 12 to 18 months.

The feeling among many professional negligence solicitors at the moment is that the rate of negligence claims against surveyors, valuers and real estate agents could be set to peak before the end of 2012.

Although there are a number of reasons for this, not least the attractiveness and accessibility of contingency fee litigation, the chief catalyst is thought to be downturn in the property market tied in with the over-optimistic valuations of many within the property valuation professions.

And it is not only valuations which have been letting clients down and causing them financial loss &ndash the standard of conveyancing work has been questionable too. In fact, there have actually been more negligence claims against solicitors this year for negligent conveyancing work than there have been claims against property valuers.

A professional negligence claims specialist with Shropshire firm FBC Mandy Bowdler LLP comments, “Unfortunately some legal firms which specialised in bulk property conveyancing are now facing claims, as although they did not charge very much for their work, in some cases the low fees did not give them the time to carry out the work correctly and costly mistakes were made.”

At the risk of sounding glib, there are two key lessons to be learnt from all this. One is that you often receive the legal advice you pay for (at least you certainly expect to), the other is that to be blindly optimistic about a fallible property market may bring short-term satisfaction, but it can bring long-term misery, for clients and valuers alike.

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Divided loyalties in divorce financial settlements

By Family Department | Published: Aug 23,2011

Divorce lawyers in Brighton, London and throughout the UK are increasingly being faced with demands from divorcing couples to assist in the division of a small but seemingly important asset – loyalty points.

A family lawyer has gone on record saying that disputed ownership of Air Miles, Tesco Clubcard and Nectar card points, amongst others, are causing delays in divorce financial settlements and can be “deal breakers” for couples who have otherwise managed to finalise division of cash, property and pensions.

It appears the accumulation of large amounts of points, which can be turned into hotel and holiday vouchers, trips to theme parks or used to buy more goods from the original retail outlet or service provider, can become a contentious issue when a couple decides to divorce

One can only imagine that once the bigger issues of a financial settlement are decided it becomes the more marginal items which are likely to cause the greatest consternation as couples attempt to ensure they receive what they feel is rightfully theirs.

A wife who has spent hours and hours in a supermarket buying groceries, loading them and unloading them and then cooking them or cleaning the house with them, is likely to feel that the store loyalty rewards should be hers.

However, when the fruits of such labour are accrued over a long period of time the points can become the equivalent of a continental holiday or a glamorous weekend stay in a top London Hotel and so both parties may feel aggrieved if they miss out.

So, it appears that loyalty points may soon become a tangible item for divorce lawyers and their clients to contemplate and where the comedy divorce headline used to be “Who gets the dog?” it could soon change to “Who gets the Advantage Card?”

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CPS to pursue construction negligence case

By Professional Negligence Department | Published: Aug 22,2011

This month we received a tragic reminder of the potential for construction industry professional negligence to have catastrophic consequences.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that it will be charging a Welsh company director with gross negligence manslaughter over his role in constructing and designing a breeze block wall which collapsed in July 2008, causing a three-year-old girl to be fatally crushed.

Although Crown Prosecution Service lawyer Rosemary Ainslie said that there was sufficient evidence of professional negligence to commence a corporate manslaughter prosecution against the company as a whole, the CPS had decided it would not be in the public interest to do so.

A North Wales Police spokesperson said that the girl’s family wished to have its privacy respected – however, her parents did release a short statement in which they expressed their hope that their “tragic and traumatic loss” would “remind and warn the construction industry of the very real dangers associated with the building trades.”

The family also called for building regulations to be reviewed and extended “to include the construction of walls”, something many professional negligence solicitors have long argued for.

However rare such tragedies might be they are entirely avoidable and if extending building regulations would help prevent even one death or case of catastrophic injury, policymakers should look to address this issue now.

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Mortgage lending boost for teachers keen to become home-owners

By Residential Department | Published: Aug 17,2011

A boost for teachers who are looking to get a foot on the property ladder, especially for those living in London and the south east of England where homes in towns such as Brighton are particularly expensive, is news of a special scheme for professional buyers struggling to find an affordable mortgage and commence residential conveyancing.

The Teachers Building Society has announced that, as part of the Government’s FirstBuy Scheme, it will lend up to 80% of the home’s value to a suitable applicant. This can be linked to a loan for the remaining 20% of the cost of the property, meaning potential homeowners struggling to save out of a low income can still buy their own house or flat.

Other professions eligible for these no-deposit loans include nursery nurses, child therapists as well as residents of Dorchester and Bournemouth in Dorset where the society is based.

One or two other small building societies are re-introducing 100% mortgages but these have a number of conditions, such as requiring parents to hold money in a savings account with the society.

The move to encourage more first-time buyers is seen as a step towards reviving the stagnant house purchase market which has stalled since the credit crunch caused lenders to become more cautious. The knock-on effect has caused difficulties for all those involved in property marketing and residential conveyancing, including estate agents and solicitors.

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Wife denied inherited wealth in divorce financial settlement

By Family Department | Published: Aug 17,2011

An unnamed ex-wife has failed in her bid for a £7 million as a High Court Judge ruled that the majority of the couple’s wealth had been inherited from the husband’s father.

After 25 years of marriage, and with a reported £24 million fortune to their names, when the couple split, the wife, in her 50s, sought a £6 million lump sum on top of the £1 million assets already in her name.

However, Mr Justice Moylan ruled that the “sharing principle” applied to matrimonial property in most divorce financial settlements should be ignored as the couple’s wealth had not been a “product of their endeavours”.

The ex-husband, in his 60s, had inherited several farms and substantial acreages of land from his father, as well as a shooting estate, a comprehensive investment portfolio and shares in the family company, a manufacturing firm which had been set up after World War II, floated in the 1950s and then sold off in the 1980s.

The Family Division of the High Court heard that before their separation, in 2009, the couple had “enjoyed a very good standard of living” with, the wife said, “no money worries and no restraints on our spending”.

Despite the amounts sought by the wife’s divorce lawyers, Judge Moylan ruled that as the wealth was “non-matrimonial” the court’s award had been based on a “generous assessment” of her needs.

Her High Court divorce financial settlement award was a lump sum of £3.3 million, in addition to her £1 million assets. There is no report as to whether she will appeal the ruling.

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Time running out for CFA professional negligence claims

By Professional Negligence Department | Published: Aug 12,2011

Time may very well be running out to make a professional negligence claim under existing Conditional Fee Arrangements.

It is strange, and some would say a shame, that a system established as part of the Access to Justice Act, which had both free market and egalitarian aims, should be set to die such an ignoble death.

After all, our current ‘no win no fee’ system was created with the intention of providing affordable legal access to all reasonable and realistic litigants (usually those who are assessed by lawyers as having an at least 60% chance of success).

Rightly or wrongly, since those prelapsarian days ‘no win no fee’ has become a byword for a venal and cynical legal system, and has been under sustained media attack for a few years now, with red top banners advancing ever closer on the sanctity of the Act’s original aims – below, editorial leaders openly call for the death of ‘compensation Britain’, with the chief scapegoat the ‘trivial’ personal injury claim.

Whatever reservations one might have about the integrity of the tabloid’s moral imperative, particularly in light of recent phone hacking and police bribery scandals, most experts now predict that Part 2 of the Government’s proposed Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will come into effect by mid-2012 and there is very little the UK’s professional negligence solicitors can do about it.

As such it is undeniable that, if and when these changes come to pass, the justice of civil litigation will be unaffordable to many deserving would-be litigants.

Yet for some, there is still time – as it stands, both success fees and After the Event Insurance premiums are still recoverable. But this could all change within twelve months.

Against this background, it almost goes without saying that if ever there were a time to launch a professional negligence claim, it is now – this time next year you just might find that you are one of those for whom justice is out of reach.

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Divorce denial for applicant after two decades of separation

By Family Department | Published: Aug 11,2011

Divorce solicitors in Brighton or London may have had more success, but the family law case of a man in Delhi who wanted to divorce his wife after she left him more than 20 years ago, has been rejected.

The couple had been married in 1987 and had one child. However, after only a few years of marriage the wife left the matrimonial home to return to her family, alleging that her husband was influenced by his family to behave rudely towards her. Her family supported her decision to return home.

When the husband attempted to seek a divorce on grounds of cruelty and desertion, two decades later, a trial court rejected his application, concluding that he had made no attempts to bring his wife back to the matrimonial home.

On appeal, Delhi High Court upheld the lower court order. Justice Kailash Gambhir said the applicant had been unable to prove that he was without fault in the relationship and therefore desertion was not a reasonable ground for divorce.

Justice Gambhir added, “The trial court had observed that the petitioner lacked the courage to bring back respondent wife to the matrimonial home due to the fear of his mother and rightly so as the minimum which can be expected of the husband and his family members towards her is to give due respect to the wife who enters into a new atmosphere in her matrimonial home.”

Applicants under English and Welsh family law would have no such problem in getting a divorce after such a lengthy separation as couples can seek a divorce, with or without the help of a divorce solicitor, after a separation of at least five years immediately prior to the presentation of the petition and without the consent of the other party.

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New internet map for London property and other UK prices

By Residential Department | Published: Aug 9,2011

With more and more potential home buyers using the internet to search for London property for sale before they consult a conveyancing solicitor, one of the largest websites has come up with an innovative extra to assist purchasers looking for a bargain or those merely curious to see how house prices are moving.

Although some people still prefer to only consult a traditional high street estate agent, especially if they want to live in a specific area, first-time buyers and movers are increasingly browsing the web to check availability and price to see the choice of houses or flats coming within their budget.

London-based Zoopla, which has bought up a number of other property-finding sites and claims to have out-stripped other similar sites in terms of users, has introduced a ‘heat map’ to add to its other searchable criteria.

The new map represents average property prices according to size, price and number of homes for sale with red colouring for the most popular and highest prices currently being paid.

This new guide to home buying, which shows all parts of the UK, both rural areas and urban ones such as London and Brighton, is expected to be of interest to any residential home owner as well as possible buyers and professionals working in the property market, including conveyancing lawyers, surveyors, mortgage lenders and estate agents.

With the internet becoming an even greater resource of information for buyers and sellers, as well as law firms which now handle much of the conveyancing administration by email, technological development is likely to continue to add to the speed and efficiency of UK property transactions.

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