Land registry has announced that property prices in all regions of England and Wales increased in July with property in Wales rising faster than any other area.
Although a month behind Nationwide’s house price index the news once again suggests that both property and land prices are on the increase. With this is mind is now the right time to start looking at buying unregistered land as an investment opportunity.
We have all been waiting for the bottom of the market but as the saying goes you can’t know the bottom until you are on the way back to the top, so the green shoots we have seen from Land Registry and Nationwide may suggest that we are once again looking forwards.
Buying unregistered land is a simple task, once you have found the owners! And with the addition complications relating to adverse possession in the land registration act 2002 most serious land and property investors are now looking to find the owners of unregistered land to make them an offer rather than waiting 12 years on the off chance of been able to claim the land via adverse possession. Land without planning permission can be relatively cheap and some land owners are holding on to land until they receive an offer on it.
Finding plots of unregistered land can be easy, you can use a company to search an area for you and contact the owners accordingly to see who would be able to sell but the most effective way is to drive around the area you wish to buy the land and search for the land yourself. If you see a piece that you like the look of simply write down what street it is on, the names or numbers of buildings close by and then contact a company to perform some land registry searches for you to see which plots of land are registered and which are not, if a property or piece of land is registered then that no problem as the owners details will be available on the land registry documents for you to see.
Buying
unregistered land is a straight forward process and you will have to register it with the Land registry so you will easily be able to prove ownership of the land should you need to. The hard part is what to offer, if the land is not for sale and you are approaching the owner with an offer to buy the land then what should that offer be? There are many factors that will influence this such as:
• Area – land is intrinsically linked to the property prices in the area
• Transport links
• Planning permission
If you are looking at land that has already had planning permission then you can expect to pay five times what you would pay if there was no permission so this is a massive consideration in the offer you should make. You must also consider the quality of the land and what purpose you are looking to use the land for. If you are hoping to build on the land then you need to assess how long it will take to obtain planning permission if indeed it will ever be granted at all.
The issue of land is an interesting topic and one that is extremely interesting. Good luck in you unregistered land searches.
