Making a property purchase in Zimbabwe is the dream of many of us. We see visions of a beautiful, tranquil home surrounded by lush gardens, pretty flowers and the music of nature’s soundtrack of birds singing in the background. And when the warm sun on your back gets a bit too much, we imagine ourselves sipping ice cold drinks and occasionally dipping into the swimming pool to cool off. That’s how we would all like to enjoy our retirement days after.
Working long hours, long days and many, many cold years in the diaspora. Unfortunately, sometimes the dream ends in disaster when due diligence into a property’s true ownership has not been made. Worse still, there are professional fraudsters who specialize in exploiting the lack of proximity to the home market that diasporans have from the home market.
So, it pays to have someone on your side to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of fraudsters. At PropertyEnd; all the estate agents we believe that being outside Zimbabwe should not disadvantage you as a buyer. Neither should it create a work with subscribe to / have signed up to a Code of X. They ensure that checks A-B-C (specific things) are done on all properties.
Furthermore, to ensure ultimate integrity/peace of mind for you in the entire home buying process, we work with a panel of Conveyancers/solicitors/ property lawyers.
The solicitors perform a Land Registry/property ownership.
Apart from checking the legal title/ownership of the property ensures this check ensures, for example, that the person selling the property actually has legal authority to sell the property. You may have heard of a strange story where a husband, fed up of his wife, decides to sell the house – forgetting that after the transaction is done, he himself, will also have nowhere to live. So to avoid being the butt of jokes at the pub feel free to ask your solicitor if the seller is of sound mind!
More seriously, it is the property solicitor’s job to hold your money in trust and ensure that the exchange of contracts takes place and that it is sent to your seller’s solicitor.
Again, this movement of funds from you to the solicitor; and ultimately to the seller, involves a risk.
To help you with this, PropertyEnd works with Heritage Pay, a specialist money transfer company who will liaise with your Solicitor / Property lawyer to ensure that your money is where it needs to be; on the day it needs to be. The money transfer service is personal too. For example, in the event that you are late in paying, Heritage Pay will provide your Solicitor/ Property lawyer with a “Proof of Payment” so that they have evidence that your payment is on its way. This is just one of the many ways in which PropertyEnd have thought through, the house-buying process in Zimbabwe.
Finally, in rare cases, there have been instances, where house buyers have bought properties in places where major developments such as roads have been earmarked. One of the most famous, such stories is the tale of a farmer in West Yorkshire whose home is on a traffic island, hemmed in, between the Northbound and Southbound carriageways. PropertyEnd recommends local surveyors to ensure that you have the ultimate peace of mind.
