When we had our offer accepted back in mid-September I never imagined that we would still be trying, on the first day of the new year, to get Contracts exchanged. "2 to 3 weeks" was our Solicitor's over-optimistic view when we appointed him. That was before we realised that taking an estate agent's recommendation for which solicitor to use was a bit of an error. It's not a difficult site - just a very close old style 400V power line to risk assess and an old aerial image showing lots of old abandoned cars on the plot that prompted a concern about possible contaminated ground.
The Seller assured us that the old cars we could see in the Bing Maps birds-eye views were not there for a long time and that they were not wrecks. We actually got a whole back-story in scrawled handwriting involving the breakdown of relatives and friends' relationships - all to justify the presence of old cars and a strange gazebo. We didn't want to be in the position however where we bought the plot and subsequently discovered hydrocarbon and other contamination that might make the site unsafe for food growing or for our kids to play in the mud. Our (and by that I mean us and not our solicitor) suggestion was to propose a retention - £500 to cover the cost of independent soil testing and a £2,000 fund to put towards potential soil remediation costs.
The seller accepted the idea quickly but then and only then did our solicitor suggest that we included a "right to rescind" clause should the costs of remediation come to more than £2,000. So we had to go back to the seller with yet another demand. If I was in their shoes I would have been annoyed having just agreed to a retention. After correcting our Solicitor's proposed wording of the Contract Rider, we finally got a response back from the Seller - the right to rescind would not be accepted.
Faced with the prospect of exchanging Contracts and then potentially being left with a huge bill for clearing up any contaminated soil, we asked our Solicitor to look into specialist indemnity insurance policies to cover us. With just a few working days before Xmas and a massive workload, he failed to find anything for us.
Our Seller is so confident that no contamination will be found that he has now offered a £4,000 retention. We've taken a view and have decided to go ahead without insurance. I'll be biting my fingernails until the soil test results are in. We're pushing our solicitor to exchange and complete tomorrow or Friday so we could soon be landowners very very soon.
We've already started interviewing potential architects and so plan to hit the ground running. It's going to be a busy and exciting 2014. . . . .
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