Change your Cross Lease to a Fee Simple Title

When you own a cross-leased property, you own a share of the land with the other owners on the title and a long-term lease on your house. It is often when selling a cross lease title that questions are asked as to whether alterations have occurred to the building. Finding out that there is a defect in the title can be frustrating with associated costs and delays in settlement to enable the cross lease title to be updated with a new Flats Plan.

Our own circumstances to take stock of the cross lease title we had owned for twenty years arose because of the rebuild of our home following the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence which resulted in it being required to be built in a slightly different location on the site.

Rather than simply update the cross lease title with a new Flat’s Plan we decided to have a conversation with our cross lease neighbour to see whether they saw a similar advantage to convert to the more valuable fee simple title. Given the possibility of future redevelopment of their own property in the future and the gain in value to our respective properties to convert we soon entered into an agreement to share the necessary survey and legal costs.

How can we help?

With the help of the Eliot Sinclair survey team both myself and our neighbours have a better title and the prospect of not needing to seek each other’s consent to build something new on our properties. A revaluation of our properties saw each gain in excess of $50k.

So how do you get started?

It’s as easy as sending us an email here, or giving us a quick call; we have 6 offices around the South Island.