Failure to assess a property appropriately can lead to significant financial losses

When our clients purchased the property their vendor produced a clear report, but it turned out that the report was for the house next door.

If the conveyancing lawyer acting in the purchase of a property makes a mistake it may well be the case that the mistake lies hidden until the property is next sold – at which stage the property may well be seriously devalued and difficult to sell.

We recently had a case where our clients’ bank made it a condition of their mortgage that there be a specialist report prepared on the property to confirm that the concrete blocks incorporated in it were not suffering a certain kind of decay that was prevalent in the area.  When our clients purchased the property their vendor produced a clear report, but it turned out that the report was for the house next door.  The solicitor acting for our client when the property was purchased did not spot this.  When our clients came to sell the property some years later the problem was spotted.  The concrete blocks incorporated in the property were decaying and the property was worth very much less than it would otherwise have been.  In fact, it was worth less than our clients’ outstanding mortgage on it. 

By the time the problem was spotted the solicitors practice who had acted for our clients in the purchase of the property had ceased trading.  We were able to trace the successor practice and recover damages for our clients to compensate them for the loss that their original solicitor’s mistake had caused.