Articles by The Professional Trustee Team
Professional trustees are involved in all sorts of transactions for their clients. One of these is signing the settlement documents when a trust is buying or selling a property.
The sale and purchase agreement for such a transaction will detail the settlement date, i.e. the date the property officially changes ownership from the seller to the buyer. At this time, the lawyers involved will prepare settlement documents, which need to be signed by both parties. If the property is being purchased or sold by a trust, this means the trustees, including any professional trustee, will need to sign them.
It should be no surprise to you when the settlement date is approaching – generally you’ll know many weeks, if not months, beforehand, as will your lawyer. If you have a professional trustee, it is advisable to let them know well in advance when the property sale is going to settle, so they can be ready to sign the documents for you. Leaving it to the last minute can cause unnecessary stress, in what can be an already stressful (albeit exciting) time.
GRA act as professional trustee for thousands of trusts. Most of our clients are great at letting us know in advance of upcoming settlements. Occasionally, though, a client will contact us in a panic only a day (or a few hours!) before the documents need to be signed. This places enormous pressure on the professional trustee, who has to drop what they are doing to attend to the matter urgently. Had they known in advance, they would have organised their workflow to accommodate.
If you leave it to the very last minute only to find that your professional is unavailable, you risk being unable to settle on the designated date. This can result in financial penalties payable to the other party in the transaction.
So if your trust is involved in a property sale and you have a professional trustee, let them know at least a week in advance of settlement date. At GRA we encourage our clients to do this by offering a discount if they give the professional trustee at least 5 working days’ notice. Regardless of whether your professional trustee does the same, things will be a lot smoother and easier if you give them plenty of notice.
This letter is to express my appreciation for the assistance and encouragement of both Anthony Lipscombe and particularly John Heaslip over the last financial year. The period since activating my trading trust has been one of considerable stress, as well as personal development, as I embarked on this as a relative business neophyte with virtually no awareness of the contemporary requirements of running a business, particularly the financial records aspect. During much of this period I have therefore felt considerable out of my depth. However I have been lucky enough to have had the benefit of the advice and support of John Heaslip in rationalizing what was a fairly chaotic set of records of the first year property trading. I am able to say that John in particular, has been unstinting in his attention to my needs and has done so in a manner which has never alluded to my extremely rudimentary grasp of managing a business, or even of being unable to set out a spread sheet properly. The result of the above guidance is that now, although my trading trust would still not be able to operate without the advice of GRA, I do least feel a sense of satisfaction that I have got to my present point without major disaster and that my property trust does now have some kind of firmer basis for any future activities - Name withheld by request
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