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12 articles on title, newest first. Browse all insights or pick another category below.
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Commonhold Property Explained: What UK Investors Need to Know in 2026
Commonhold has existed in England and Wales since 2004 and has been used barely at all. That is about to change. Government policy is now firmly pointed at commonhold becoming the default tenure for new flats, with leasehold reform running alongside it. For investors holding or acquiring flats, this is not an abstract policy debate.
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Boundary Disputes When Buying Property: A UK Investor's Due Diligence Guide
Boundaries are one of the few areas of English property law where the paperwork is deliberately imprecise. Registered title plans show general boundaries only, physical features move over decades, and neighbours reach informal accommodations that never reach a deed. For an investor, this matters as a commercial variable: a boundary question can affect usable site area, development potential, lender appetite, insurability and the ease of a future sale.
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Estate Charges on Freehold Houses: What UK Property Investors Need to Check Before Buying
For most investors, 'freehold house' suggests a clean, self-contained asset: no ground rent, no service charge, no managing agent. On a growing number of modern developments, that assumption no longer holds. Many freehold houses built since the 1990s sit on privately managed estates where the roads, green spaces, drainage and lighting are never adopted by the local authority.
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Chancel Repair Liability: What UK Property Investors Need to Know
Chancel repair liability is one of the more unusual entries an investor can find in a legal pack. It is a centuries-old obligation that can, in limited circumstances, require the owner of land to contribute to the cost of repairing the chancel of a parish church. It sounds archaic - yet it still appears in title registers, search results and special conditions across England and Wales.
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Adverse Possession and UK Property Investment: A Due Diligence Guide for Buyers
Most investors first encounter adverse possession as an awkward line in a title register or an unexplained discrepancy between the title plan and what is physically on the ground. It sounds dramatic, but in practice it is usually a matter to clarify and price rather than a reason to abandon a deal.
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Title Indemnity Insurance: A Practical Guide for UK Property Investors
Few tools in UK conveyancing do more quiet work for property investors than title indemnity insurance. A missing planning consent, an unclear right of way, a restrictive covenant with no traceable beneficiary - issues like these appear in legal packs every week, and in many cases the practical answer is not months of investigation but a one-off insurance policy that transfers the risk for a modest premium.
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Overage and Clawback Clauses: What UK Property Investors Need to Know
Overage and clawback clauses are among the most financially significant provisions a property investor can encounter in a legal pack - and among the most routinely underestimated. If you are acquiring land, a development site, a commercial property, or even a residential property where planning uplift is foreseeable, an overage obligation can materially reduce the return on your investment for years after completion.
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Rights of Way and Easements: What UK Property Investors Need to Know Before Bidding
Easements and rights of way appear in the legal pack of almost every UK property transaction. For most acquisitions they are routine - a neighbour's right to cross a shared driveway, a utility company's right to run pipes beneath the garden, or a long-standing footpath crossing a field edge. For some acquisitions, however, they are transaction-defining.
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Flying Freeholds: What Property Investors Need to Know Before Bidding
A flying freehold is one of those terms that surfaces regularly in property legal packs but is rarely explained in plain terms. At its simplest, it arises where part of one freehold property sits above or below part of another freehold property - without the owner of the upper part having any legal right within the lower title, and vice versa.
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Covenants Running With the Land: How They Affect UK Property Investment
A covenant running with the land is a legal obligation or right attached to a piece of land that binds not just the original parties to the agreement but all future owners of the land. Unlike a purely personal contract - which creates obligations only between the contracting parties - a covenant that runs with the land follows the property through successive changes of ownership. For property investors, this means that covenants agreed decades or even centuries ago may still be enforceable today.
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What Is the Land Registry Title Register? A Guide for UK Property Investors
For any investor acquiring property in England or Wales, the Land Registry title register is the starting point for due diligence. It is the official record of ownership and the primary source of information about who owns a property, what the nature of that ownership is, and what rights, obligations and interests affect it. Reading and interpreting the title register accurately is a foundational investor skill.
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Title Defects and Restrictive Covenants: What UK Property Investors Need to Know
A clean, unencumbered title is the foundation of any sound property investment. In practice, however, the title register and associated documents frequently reveal entries, restrictions, obligations and historic constraints that require assessment before exchange. Understanding what these entries mean, how significant they are in context, and what the practical routes to resolution look like is an important part of investor-grade due diligence.