I paid off the mortgage on my home in the North West of England in early 2023.
I didn’t receive any notification from the lender, Chelsea Building Society, that the mortgage had been cleared until months later.
It also never sent me back the title deeds, which I understand is standard practice when a mortgage is paid off. Have they been lost or destroyed?
I’m worried about someone having access to this personal information J.F, Salford
Confidential: This reader is worried about her property deeds falling into the wrong hands
Helen Crane of This is Money replies: You bought your home in 2003, and the mortgage had been with the Chelsea since the beginning.
Until the 2000s, the deeds to a home – officially known as the Register of Title – were a physical sheet of paper.
These documents were produced by the Land Registry, a Government department, when a home was bought.
Traditionally, your mortgage lender would keep the deeds until you paid off the loan.
They treat your home as collateral, meaning they could sell it to recover their money if you stopped paying the mortgage.
The deeds are the bank or building society’s proof that they hold an interest in the property.
When someone paid off their mortgage, the deeds would typically be posted to them after they made their final payment.
However, in 2003, the same year you bought your home, the rules on how property deeds were kept changed.
Digital record-keeping was becoming more common, and the Land Registry started filing these documents electronically. When someone buys a home today, they and their mortgage lender each receive a digital copy.
In today’s digital system, if a homeowners wants a replacement copy of their title deeds, or if they never had a digital copy as in your case, they can be purchased from the Land Registry. It costs £7 for a digital download, and £11 for the document to be printed and posted to you.
You never received a digital copy, so are confident your deeds were recorded in the old, paper-based system.
As you approached the milestone of paying off your 20-year mortgage, you looked forward to receiving the deeds, partly as a symbol of becoming mortgage-free and partly for your own record-keeping.
However, they never arrived.
This concerned you as didn’t like the idea of someone else having private information about you.
The title register includes details of how much you paid for the property, and your name and address.
You didn’t know whether your deeds were gathering dust in a file somewhere, or had been lost or destroyed.
You complained to Yorkshire Building Society, which is now the parent company of the Chelsea, several times but felt your concerns were not addressed.
The customer service team told you to contact the Land Registry to get a copy of the deeds, but didn’t answer your question of what happened to the original.
This led you to suspect the deeds had been thrown away without your knowledge. After this you wrote to the chief executive, Sue Allen, but got a reply saying the issue had already been addressed.
‘I felt I was hitting my head against a corporate wall,’ you told me.
‘I fail to understand why they didn’t send the deeds out when they no longer needed them, but they won’t answer this question of what they have done with them and keep fobbing me off with the Land Registry.’
I contacted Yorkshire Building Society to ask whether your deeds were still in its possession.
Frustratingly, it would not confirm either way – but from its response, I think we can safely assume that they are not.
A spokesperson for Yorkshire Building Society said: ‘Dematerialisation in 2003 meant it was no longer a requirement to keep paper copies of house deeds, and it has become commonplace for them to be stored electronically at the Land Registry instead.’
However, after I got in touch it did send an electronic copy of the deeds to you, so that you don’t have the time or expense of getting it from the Land Registry.
It said this ‘Should be all you need to demonstrate her ownership of her home.’
YBS acted within the letter of the law here, as it had no requirement to keep your paper deeds on file after 2003.
That said, I think it shows how little regard finance firms have for those who don’t use email or computers, or simply prefer to have paper records.
I increasingly hear from readers who can’t find a phone number or address for a company, or have had letters they have sent in the post ignored.
This group may be shrinking in number, but that doesn’t mean firms can just abandon them.
If you’d like to name and shame a company that won’t send you paper bills, pick up the phone or communicate by post, get in touch: helen.crane@thisismoney.co.uk
