Dear Experts, Thanks for the wonderful service you re providing through this online forum. Would like to run my situation by you and seek your valuable opinions:
A flat came up for sale in Thane, Maharashtra and I negotiated and finalized a price with the seller. The seller had bought the property from the previous owner of the the flat, who herself had bought it directly from the the builder.
The seller had availed of a loan to finance his purchase and had deposited his sale deed and the previous sale deed (between the builder and the first buyer) with the bank. The seller paid off the loan fully two years ago and his agent had collected the letters and sale deed documents from the bank.
Right when we were ready to finalized the agreement, the seller announced that he doesn't have the first sale deed (the one between the builder and the first buyer).- not even a copy. He now believes the bank never returned him to him and that they returned him only the sale deed to which he was a party. He called the bank several times and they insisted that they had returned both sale deeds.
I got a copy of the first sale deed from the files of the cooperative housing society. This copy indicated the stamp duty paid, but it doesn't have the stamp of the sub-registrar and neither could we find a copy of the receipt from the sub-registrar's office anywhere in the deed.
So now I have two situations:
1. I don't know if the first sale deed was registered
2. The first sale deed is very likely non-recoverable. In that case, what are the alternative paperwork I need to have in my possession to serve as a mitigation for the lost sale deed. In other words, could I run into problems when I decided to sell the flat in the future
3. What if we discover that the first sale deed was never registered? How can it be mitigated?
I understand that buying a property without all the sale deeds in the sale deeds chain, even with all the mitigation in place, can still pose challenges to me when I try to sell the flat.
Thanks for any advice in advance
Joe
