Owners are responsible for paying for repairs from the time a properly agreed decision to go ahead with work is reached. However, if an owner sells and moves, it may be difficult to contact them and to get them to pay for their share of repair costs.
You can overcome this problem by serving a Notice of Potential Liability for Costs. This notice makes the selling owner and the new owner jointly responsible for the repair costs. Any owner in the same building, or your property factor, can serve this notice.
You need to serve this notice through Registers of Scotland. The cost of registering the notice is £80 per flat and needs to be lodged at least 14 days before the sale takes place. The notice lasts for three years, but can be renewed. It can only be served by another owner in the same building or the property factor.
Owners are permitted to submit applications, however, the notice is usually lodged by a solicitor due to the complexity of the forms.
If you are working well with existing owners, you are advised to discuss the use of this safeguard with them first.
Some property factors also use this notice as a way of enforcing repairs as it means costs can be recovered on sale of the flat.
You can find out if a Notice of Potential Liability has been served onto a property by purchasing a copy of the title deeds via the Registers of Scotland website.
Legal reference
Next steps
- Notice of Potential Liability form download (this form is used for the notice that is registered in the Land Register or Register of Sasines and can be found in schedule 2 of the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004)
