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Commonhold - have you seen one? |
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To date, the advent of commonhold looks like an anti-climax; there have hardly been any commonhold transactions and, apparently, the first one in the whole of southern England was only processed in August.
Indeed, an article by one of the solicitors involved in that transaction does make relatively grim reading for those who are enthusiastic about the commonhold system. It seems that, in practice, very few lenders are able to easily process commonhold applications (even if, in theory, they will lend on commonholds). Moreover, it seems that some conveyancing solicitors have made it clear that they are not prepared to invest the time and money in training their staff on how to process commonholds, and so they refuse to act (whilst many estate agents have simply never heard of commonhold).
It seems that if commonhold is to take off, then considerably more education will be needed of lenders, agents, and conveyancers. Apparently, a panel of law firms prepared to act on commonhold transactions has been established but we have to say that we remain sceptical as to whether the technical benefits of a commonhold structure are likely to outweigh the perceived practical disadvantages. However, for an article illustrating how commonhold was recently used to solve a conveyancing difficulty see [2005] 154 Property Law Journal 5.
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October 2005 |
