Legal Charge
The legal charge is not exactly as the name suggests, as no-one is charging you anything. The word ‘charge’ here is used in the sense of ‘charged with the care of something, and it means that the lenders who loaned you a mortgage have been put in legal charge of your property. But don’t worry, it doesn’t mean they own it. It just means that if you default on your payments to a great extent, they can decide to repossess and sell it since their right to legal charge of the property has been lodged with the Land Registry.
Generally speaking a bank will be reluctant to take the step of applying their right to legal charge – they aren’t property dealers and it is time consuming for them, but other companies will be quite happy to exercise that right.
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