Six weeks. That’s how long the solicitor in Ireland told us it would take to complete the purchase of our house we’d agreed to buy in Lissacaha, Co. Cork. Before we even put our house on the market in England, someone Trish’s niece knew found out we were moving and offered to buy it. So I gave my employer six weeks notice, packed my bags and six weeks later I set off in our tiny VW campervan with our cat, leaving Mrs P (Trish), who moved into her brother’s house, to complete her degree course in England to join me later. I’d the promise of some work in Ireland as a management trainer, and with the sale of our house quickly completed we’d just got enough money to pay for the house in Ireland and complete the work needed to make it liveable. Until the sale was completed I could live in the campervan if I needed.
The warning signs came slowly. First the guy who’d promised me the work vanished, taking my reference books and other material I’d lent him with him.
The weeks passed by. I heard nothing from the solicitors. Our’s told us he’d heard nothing from the vendor’s solicitor. So I contacted the vendor who lived up the road from ‘our’ house and she assured me things were progressing normally. Rather than live in the camper she agreed to my request to live, temporarily, in the house we were buying from her. More weeks passed without hearing anything. Another reassurance from the vendor, but this time she told me I’d have to move out as her solicitor in the big city of Cork had told her I shouldn’t be in the property.
So I collected my few possessions (and our cat!) and moved out. A few more weeks passed without any contact from the solicitors. Our solicitor discovered that the delay was caused because the vendor’s solicitor couldn’t find the title deeds to the property. The vendor assured me the solicitor had them and that she was pushing him into competition.
Even more time passed. A tiny campervan is not the place to live in and by now i’d learned enough about the vendor from locals to suggest we ‘formalise’ the situation by offering to to rent in the meantime. She accepted immediately and the cat and myself moved back in that day.
Yet more time passed and hearing nothing from our solicitors I contacted them again and was told in no uncertain terms that not having title deeds to the property meant that parting with your money meant you may end up with no money and no house. He told me clearly that if he was in my shoes he’d walk away from the purchase. I now had no job, no house and our dream was disappearing fast. Another visit to the vendor and again I was told by her that she was definitely wanting to sell the house and she’d been in contact with her solicitor only the previous day to see what was happening. Clearly nothing!. But she handed me a copy of the deeds to the property she claimed she was selling us.
Further disappointment came when I discovered the threshold for paying stamp duty in Ireland was so low that we’d have to add an additional several thousand pounds which we did not have, to our budget. Our dream was crumbling in front of our eyes as we’d absolutely no spare money and hadn’t anticipated this extra cost.
We’d sold the house in England. We had no house, no job, income or money. Things were not going well. This was overcome by a 'brown paper job', the details of which I won't go into but it amounted to me and the owner going to the bank, drawing out several thousand pounds and giving it to her in cash.
Trish visited me during a break from her studies. and we went to our solicitor who again spelt out the dire consequences of attempting to buy something without any title deeds. In desperation I handed him the copy of the deeds & property folio map the vendor had given me. He gave them one glance and flicked them onto his desk.. “This isn’t the right property”, he pointed out. I asked him how he knew and he explained the property portfolio number wasn’t the same one as the vendor’s solicitor had been selling. But I knew it was the right house as I could clearly recognise the layout of it on the map. This I told the solicitor. “Are you sure?”, he asked. “OH yes - 100%,” I have qualification in hill/mountain walking, I spend a lot of time map reading in the UK and europe, and then pointed out the relevant features on the property map. He wasn’t convinced and looked in his files for the copy of deed he’d got from Doody’s, the vendor’s solicitor, in Cork. “Look”, he said in triumph, “Her ye are, the property file number is different - your map isn’t the right house”. This time I plucked the copy from him and examined document & map. It was immediately clear to me that the property deeds & map he’d got was in fact the vendor’s own one - the one she was living in now. This I told our solicitor who still wasn’t entirely convinced so I patiently explained that I had no doubt and could easily recognise all the features on both both property maps and I carefully pointed these out on the two respective maps. I had no doubt her solicitor was attempting to sell us the wrong house - her own house!.
Rural Ireland is a very parochial place. He gave it some thought and then said he could recall selling the very same house many years ago for a previous vendor and went away to look for the relevant files. A while later he returned and dusted these off on the desk. Sure enough they were identical in layout and proved I was right.
The vendor’s solicitor had been trying to sell us the wrong house - the one the vendor was actually living in right now. We called Doody’s in Cork city. Clearly the big man in cork wasn’t used to be being told by by an unemployed Englishman he was selling the wrong house. He spoke to confirm what I’d said. But the matter of the ‘missing’ deeds still remained.
The vendor wan’t entirely happy with her solicitor and told him she’d trusted him with the deeds long ago when she’d taken out the mortgage on the house she was now living in. Our solicitor had an eureka moment. He asked which house had she taken out the mortgage for and checked with her solicitors to enquire which house he’d registered the mortgage with. It was the wrong house!! All the years she’d lived there and thought she’d actually had a mortgage on her own house whilst in fact her solicitor had taken out a mortgage on ‘our’ property and consequently the deeds were safe in the hands of the mortgage lender. To add to her anger it also meant that the property she’d been living in for many years was never insured as the insurance, tied to the mortgage, was also taken out for the house we were purchasing.
A week or two later the house was legally ours.
See it here::-https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3144970274483656463
That of course was not the end of the matter. The previous occupant was Ian Bailey, the most infamous self confessed murder in Ireland and he had now he moved a 100m up the road with the women we bought the house from. During his High Court court case where he attempted to sue all the newspapers we had endless visits and interviews with the press, police and overseas film crews. I was even on the front page of on of the irish red-tops.
I wrote a couple of articles about him here:-
Living next to a suspected Killer
A quick Google for "Ian Bailey Cork, will turn up thousands of posts.
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