Question
a) Your firm is selling a part of a very large and expensive freehold estate in Nottingham. Your supervising partner dislikes and distrusts the local firm instructed for the buyers and has therefore altered the contract requiring a personal completion of this unregistered sale of part of a freehold. The contract requires the purchase price to be lodged with your firm on the day of completion and for the buyer's solicitor to attend at your offices to complete. The seller, your client, will be retaining the remainder of the land. There is a newly erected mansion house on the land being sold. The seller does have a mortgage but the consideration is not sufficient to discharge it. The bank has issued a release. There are no agents. The buyer's solicitors are just across the road and are therefore able to complete in the way required by contract. Please list the documents you will hand over and please also list anything you will receive. Are there any other steps or actions you will take at completion?
b) You are hoping to complete a purchase for a client by post where the Law Society's Code for Completion is not being adopted. This is because you already have the seller's solicitors undertaking to pay off the seller's mortgage. Relying upon that solicitor's undertaking, you have sent off the completion monies. Is that undertaking sufficient? In your answer please state briefly what are the main provisions of the Law Society's Code for Completion.