An interest is bought on paper before it is bought on site

What the register saysbefore an offer

The register is in three parts and each part answers a different question. The property register describes the land and the estate and lists the rights that benefit it. The proprietorship register gives the class of title and any restriction on dealing with it, which is where a lender's consent or a trustee's requirement will show. The charges register carries what burdens the land: legal charges, restrictive covenants, easements granted over it, notices and agreements.

A covenant restricting the use of the land, or a right of way across the part a building would stand on, is not a detail to be resolved later. It sets the shape of anything that can be built, and it does so before design, before a planning application and before a price is agreed. Where the title is leasehold the lease itself is read in the same way: the term left, the alienation clause, the alterations clause and the repairing obligation decide whether the interest can be developed and let at all.

What the searches saybefore exchange

The local land charges register shows what has been registered against the land by the authority: tree preservation orders, enforcement notices, smoke control, financial charges. The local authority enquiries cover the road status, whether the carriageway serving the frontage is maintainable at public expense, planning history, building control history and nearby road schemes. The drainage and water search shows whether a public sewer crosses the land, which decides whether a build-over agreement will be needed later.

Replies to pre-contract enquiries are raised on the seller in writing and answered in writing, and the answers are kept with the file because they are relied on. Where anything is unknown rather than clean, it is recorded as unknown.

• Official copies
• Title plan
• Local search
• Drainage and water
• Environmental
• Replies to enquiries

Exchange, completion, registrationthree dates

Heads of terms are agreed subject to contract and bind nobody. Exchange fixes the completion date and makes the sale enforceable. Completion moves the money and the deed on the day named. The land transaction return is then filed within the statutory period, and the transfer is applied for at the land registry so that the register shows the company as proprietor. Until that application completes, the company holds an unregistered dealing with a priority period, and that period is finite.

A disposal runs the same way in the other direction, and disposal is half of what this stage is for. An interest can be bought and sold again without a brick being laid, with or without a consent attached to it, and the work on the paper is the same work.