Mortgage paid off - What happens to house deeds?

Mortgage will be paid off later this year. What happens to the deeds?

I have heard of people leaving say 50p still owing, and the bldg soc retain (look after) the deeds for free. SoI suppose that strictly speaking the mortgage is still ongoing. Is this correct? I so is it common, or adviseable, or should I pay up in full, and take responsibility for the safe keeping of the deeds?

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Reply to
Kit
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It might be worth asking on uk.legal, but I believe the deeds are generally all held electronically now, so paper copies are just "curiousity value".

It was quite interesting looking at ours when we got them last year anyway !

Reply to
Colin Wilson

"Colin Wilson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.individual.net...

you could ask the building society to hold them, i believe that if you leave

5 owing on your mortgage they will hold then free of charge or, you could ask your bank
Reply to
Alan

When I paid mine off, I asked for the deeds to be sent to me. I was expecting, in my naivety, some dusty parchment documents to arrive in a brown paper parcel.

It turned out that I merely received a printout in letter form from my local Land Register and that there are no deeds as such. AIUI, for all registered properties the title is now only recorded on the Land Registry computer system(s).

If that is the case, then there is nothing for your building society to "keep". You might then redeem your mortgage in full and have the charge removed from the record in the Land Register.

Reply to
Dave N

But wouldn't doing so also have the effect of leaving the building society with some ongoing legal rights over your property? That may not be a problem now, but might be something which could turn around and bite you later if you ever got in to some financial complications with the building society.

I think I'd feel more comfortable paying off the mortgage completely and know that nobody else had any rights over it. I'm not sure I'd trust a bank or building society to take care of the deeds anyway. When they were needed for my mother's house, HSBC at first denied even holding them and it took ages for them to find out where they had actually stored them.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Blunt

there might be other important documents bundled up with the deeds. woodworm guarantees, covenants giving access to you garage etc. it migth also contain the whole chain of ownership from when the house was built. that can be very interesting for an old building. Finally, there can be mistakes in the land registry plans (my old house had such) and by keeping the old deeds you are able to correct these.

Robert

Reply to
RobertL

A fair point but perhaps it is pertinent that my house had been built in

1975. Copies of guarantees for woodworm, etc., should be have been provided to the purchaser when the property was conveyed. What I received when I redeemed the mortgage was an "Official Copy of register of title" which stated, "Under s67 of the Land Registration Act 2002, this copy is admissible in evidence to the same extent as the original." The form listed the chain of ownership of the land since 1924 and all covenants. I would trust that any mistakes in the Title Plan will be noticed during the conveyance and then sorted out by the solicitors, otherwise it could get very messy.

I've just checked the Land Registry web site:-

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It seems to be mandatory that all property in England and Wales that has either been re-mortgaged or sold since 1 April 1998, must be registered with the Land Registry. If you look at the FAQs, it seems that the Land Registry is sensitive to people's wishes to retain historical documents, but that didn't apply to my situation so I cannot comment.

Their web site (About Us) explains, amongst other things, that their principal aims are:-

# to guarantee title to registered estates and interests in land for the whole of England and Wales # to provide ready access to up-to-date and guaranteed land information so enabling confident dealings in property and security of title

I think the main point here is that once a property has been registered with the Land Registry, all earlier title deeds are superseded.

Reply to
Dave N

That's what we did years ago with Abbey's (Abbey National at the time) "Deedsafe" scheme. There's no fee for this but they wanted 50 if we paid the mortgage up in full to transfer the deeds. We still get an annual statement showing 50p outstanding so it's cost them several pounds in postage.

I got the Land Registry entry online for 2, and we already had a photocopy of the deeds when we purchased the house. There are some curious restrictive covenants that everyone ignores....

Reply to
LSR

That worrys me somewhat. It not unheard of (cough, cough), for computer systems to "malfunction" or for data to, cough, go missing...

Think of the consequences of that!

Reply to
<nospam

Some lenders won't allow you to keep a mortgage going if the debt is below a certain figure, e.g.2,500. You have to pay it all off or keep it above that figure.

Rob Graham

Reply to
Rob graham

I`d strongly suggest you have a check yourself rather than relying on the solicitors to do it all for you, unless you think they never make mistakes. Some solicitors are very good and check everything they should do, some don`t always seem to be quite as diligent.

Reply to
Simon Finnigan

Quite - which is why I wrote "will be noticed" followed by "then sorted out by the solicitors". I didn't want to re-write War & Peace so I chose to imply my meaning.

Reply to
Dave N

It read that you`d be trusting your solicitors to notice any problems and solve them during the conveyance - hence my post.

Reply to
Simon Finnigan

I think they have the right to "offset" accounts, so that if you got into debt on say a credit card (eg 5000) with the same bank that you have your

50p o/s mortgage with they might reserve the right to offset it against your mortgage account so you would then end up with a mortgage of 5000.50 !!

I'm not sure if they would effectively be able to convert an unsecured debt into a secured debt though, but that could be a risk to consider.

Reply to
Adrian Boliston

When I paid off my Abbey mortgage I collected (after a couple of months) a huge bundle of papers going right back to 1900 when the house was built. Left them in a filing cabinet in the study for a few months, took to reading them and realised that the house wasn't registered (not a requirement when I purchased it in 1970's, but my solicitor then omitted to tell me this), so the only evidence of my ownership was this bundle of papers.

Did a bit of research on the Land Registry website, downloaded the forms, indexed all the papers, then took the whole lot to the local Land Registry office, plus a cheque for £200, and got the property registered. Took about 2 weeks, then I went back and collected "the bundle" plus a copy of the registration certificate. The Land Registry keep electronic copies of all the relevant bits. A very helpfull bunch of people they were to.

So now I have all the original deeds and other conveyance documents "for interests sake" but they won't be needed when I come to sell the house as the title is registered.

I sleep a bit easier now!

David.

Reply to
DavidM

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