I’m just buying a brand new house. My solicitor has sent me a copy of a load of things from the builder’s solicitors called “restrictive covenants”. He says I’ve got to read through them carefully and make sure I understand them. Mostly it’s stuff like “I can’t keep pigs or poultry in my back garden”. Is it all legal twaddle or should I be worried?
Your solicitor is quite right – you must make sure you understand them. These restrictions are binding on you and ‘run with the land’ so whoever buys the house from you, is also bound. You might think if the builder goes out of business, they’ll be unenforceable – but you’d be quite wrong. Broadly speaking, anyone who takes a benefit from them, such as your neighbours, can enforce them against you as well.
Usually they are common sense – though the one about not keeping pigs and poultry is a bit old fashioned these days. That one’s more commonly found in properties built just after the Second War when people were moving from agricultural backgrounds where it was normal to keep animals in the garden. The builders thought things like that should be prohibited in order to maintain the residential status of the development. Before that, in the early 20th century, they were obsessed with preventing tallow making (candles), boiling pig tripe, and spinning yarn in the cellar. Nowadays, it’s common to have restrictive covenants preventing you from parking caravans in your front drive or from running a business from your house.
A common one says you must not make any alteration to the exterior of the property without getting the builder’s consent. This means that if you want to build an extension, you have to get the builder’s agreement as well as any planning permission. Lots of people overlook that covenant and it causes no end of trouble for us conveyancers, as we have to rush around at the last minute trying to get “retrospective consent” for you.
And oh yes…. That one about not running a business from home is going to be a tricky one in the future. When does working from home become operating a business from home? If you’re a childminder getting paid for it? If you connect to your employer’s computer systems and take a day off work to get that “thinking job” done? If you’re a self-employed trader and your partner does the books at home? Expect trouble on this, because again society has changed and the definitions are becoming out of date.