Selling house with Form K Restrictions

[gazfocus]

I am nearly at the completion stage of selling mine and my wifes house. At the beginning of the process, our solicitor notified me of 3 'charging orders' on our house and asked if it was our intention to pay them out of the proceeds of the sale, on completion. At the time, we thought they had to be paid so we said 'yes'.

 

Fast forward several weeks, and while we've been pushing our solicitor to get a completion date from the buyers solicitor, I have been reading more about the 'charging orders' and realised that as they are in my sole name where the house is jointly owned, they are indeed 'Form K Restrictions' and as such do not actually need to be paid upon the sale of the house - my justification to our solicitor is that I'd like the option to negotiate the settlements with the creditors, which I cannot do alongside the pressure of trying to get the house sold (it's taken nearly 6 weeks for my solicitor to even get redemption figures from one of the creditors). 

 

I have since gone back to my solicitor to say in essence that I don't wish for these restrictions to be paid out of the proceeds of sale, but she keeps coming back with statements such as "Your buyer’s solicitors require this to be removed on completion, in which we will require the certificate from the creditors." and "You would need to come to an agreement with the creditors. As I understand it, they will not provide the certificates to remove the restrictions until the charges are paid. We are required to undertake to your buyer’s solicitors that this will be done at completion."

 

My solicitor clearly lacks understanding about what the Form K restriction entails, and despite trying to explain it, and sending her the guidance from 'Practice Guide 76' on the land registry website together with snippets from other threads on here, she just isn't getting it.

 

We are not talking a vast amount of money here, in relation to the sale price of the property, but it's about £7,500 in total that she wants us to pay out of the proceeds. The house we are buying needs significant renovations so even if we managed to shave off £1,000 through negotiations with the creditors, that would be a help.

 

I was just wondering if there are any other tips I could try to encourage the solicitor to agree to not pay the restrictions?

[dx100uk]

1 hour ago, gazfocus said:

Your buyer’s solicitors require this to be removed on completion, in which we will require the certificate from the creditors

 

i very much doubt this to be true.

two sols cant be getting it wrong.

 

pers as you are paying her to do a job under your control.!!

i'd tell her she MUST contact them and clearly state that they do NOT need to be paid before the sale neither does a certificate be produced and that once the home is registered in their clients name on Land registry.... they will vanish. read the restriction k advice on that site!!