SELLING HOUSES AND APARTMENTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND
Avoid house moving hold ups
We can help you find out if there’s any potential difficulties with your management company that might affect your property sale.
Use this link to answer a few questions about your management company and we’ll be in touch to let you know if there is anything to be concerned about..
The good news is a lot of issues can easily be remedied if caught in time so it’s well worth filling in the form to make sure you’re good to go should you decide to sell in the future.
Selling a house or apartment with service charges
If you live in a housing development that has communal areas, eg a green, landscaping, apartment hallways then you are likely paying a service charge for maintenance of these areas. As long as the gardener keeps turning up and the development looks presentable you’re probably thinking everything is fine, right? Wrong.
Hidden management company pitfalls
If the developer has not transferred ownership of the communal areas (also called residual lands) to the Residents Management Company (a dormant limited company that each owner is a shareholder in) this will raise a red flag with the mortgage lender if you try to sell or re-mortgage. If the developer has since become insolvent then that red flag becomes a red light and your purchaser is unlikely to get mortgage approval. Unfortunately this situation is more common in Northern Ireland than you’d realise due to the collapse of the housing market in 2008 which put many developers into insolvency. Click here to read Sarah’s experience of rehabilitating a management company near Ballyclare.
Failure to transfer the residual land is actually only one problem with the management company that can hold up or derail a sale or re-mortgage. For this reason in 2016 the Northern Ireland Law Society issued guidelines to solicitors to ensure they could alert purchasers to management company problems. While this protects the purchaser it’s an expensive way for the vendor to find out there’s a management company problem that may prevent them from completing!
