For owners, not buyers
When I bought this property, I didn’t know it could ever be difficult to sell or remortgage. Now I’m stuck.
Would you have bought the property if you had known?
If you had known about the problem before you committed — and understood what it could mean when you later came to sell or remortgage — would it have changed your decision?
- Would you have paid the same price?
- Would you have wanted it investigated first?
- Would you have walked away?
If knowing about the problem might have changed what you did, the next question is obvious.
Did you receive the right advice when you bought?
You may not know the answer yet. But if nobody explained the problem, or you are now questioning what you were told at the time, that is worth looking at.
You don’t need to know whether anyone was at fault. Tell us what happened and when you bought. We’ll talk it through with you.
What has come up?
These are the problems that most often surface years after a purchase, when a buyer’s survey, a buyer’s solicitor or a remortgage valuation looks at the property properly for the first time since you bought it.
How this works
You tell us what happened
What has come up, when you bought, when it was first raised with you, and who your lender was at the time if you remember. It takes a couple of minutes.
We call you
Usually within one working day, and usually for about twenty minutes. We establish the facts and the order they happened in. We won’t tell you whether you have a claim, because at that stage nobody could.
We look at the position when you bought
Where the records allow, we can look at what your lender required at the time and how that compared with the wider market — and at the kinds of issues conveyancers were addressing with buyers.
You decide what happens next
Sometimes that is nothing. Sometimes it is a specialist solicitor — and only if you ask us to make that introduction.
Why we can ask what the position was when you bought
Most of the time, the honest answer to “what was my conveyancer told about this in 2013?” is that nobody can say. The documents that would answer it are revised constantly and the old versions disappear.
Lexsure has retained them since May 2007. Two sets of historical material sit behind every conversation we have.
What lenders required of conveyancers
Lender-specific conveyancing requirements as they stood at the time, rather than as they stand today. Lenders did not all take the same approach, and their requirements changed — so which lender you used and when you completed can both matter.
What conveyancers addressed with buyers
Historical Report on Title material, showing the kinds of issues that have been addressed when conveyancers report to homebuyers. That is a different question from what lenders required, and often the more useful one.
Neither of those establishes that anyone was at fault, and neither is something you buy from us. They are the reason we can ask a question about your purchase that most people cannot answer, and the reason a twenty-minute conversation is worth having.
Who you would be speaking to
When I Bought is run by Lexsure Ltd. We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. What we do is establish what the historical record says, and help you work out whether what happened when you bought is worth someone looking at properly.
- We don’t charge you anything, and there is nothing to buy on this website.
- We won’t pass your details to a solicitor, or to anyone else, unless you separately ask us to.
- If you do, up to three specialist firms may receive them, and they pay us a fee for the introduction. We would rather say that here than let you discover it later.
- Time limits apply to matters of this kind, which is why we ask both when you bought and when the problem was first raised with you.
More on how we’re paid, the archive and its limits and who we are.