Sloping gardens

Everything having gone smoothly for a while, I let myself start to doodle some potential gardening plans. However, now everything seems to be snarled up by some kind of issue with the leasehold... The vendor owns the freehold but it seems there is no official evidence that she also owns the leasehold (which wasn't cancelled when the freehold was purchased). This has only come up because I chased my solicitor on why the draft contracts hadn't been received yet. She didn't appear to have noticed (which I guess is understandable given the way the market is right now). I then asked her to clarify what this meant for my purchase and she sent me an unpunctuated gobbledygook response. It wasn't even legalese, just very badly written. Nice to see what I'm paying her all this money for... As a fellow professional, I would never send a response to a patient or relative that read so poorly, and they aren't even paying for my services (not directly anyway)! Anyway, I'm now flummoxed as to whether this is some kind of purchase ending disaster or just a very minor issue that will be easily sorted out. So, should I be emotionally distancing myself from the property and starting to look for somewhere else, or carrying on trying to work out if I can squeeze in an asparagus bed?

I'm hoping the land registry can clarify things for me (and they are already helping), because there certainly doesn't seem to be any blooming point in asking my solicitor.

We had this same problem, so I sympathise. I still don't fully understand it though, PamH did all the work on our move. Our solicitor didn't help by being diligently uncommunicative throughout the process, but it was something to do with when the previous owners bought the freehold many years ago, that meant they then owned both the freehold and the leasehold. I gather that the leasehold title hadn't been updated in the land registry and this had to be done before the sale went through. But the land registry had a big backlog and it would take them a month or three to get around to it unless expedited. Our solicitor successfully applied to get it expedited once everything else was ready and this was the only thing holding up the chain. Once they agreed to get on with it, the land registry sorted it inside a week.

So we now own both the freehold and the leasehold. I think.

With any luck it'll be a bit easier for you, if indeed you're in exactly the same situation.