The price is agreed in one conversation. What is being sold, who has to agree to it and where the boundary is takes rather longer, and it is the whole job.
Somebody telephones to say they have agreed to buy a plot on their wife's island, the price is settled, and they want to pay a deposit this week. My job at that point is to be the least popular person in the conversation, because almost every island land transaction that goes wrong goes wrong in the fortnight after that phone call.
Here is what I ask, in order, and why.
What exactly is being offered? Not the plot. The interest in the plot. On the islands that can be several different things, and the word people use for all of them is the same. Sometimes it is a holding somebody can transfer. Sometimes it is a long lease with years left to run and conditions attached. Very often it is a share of something a family holds together, in which case what is for sale is one person's part of it and the other parts are not theirs to sell. All three are ordinary, all three can be perfectly sound, and they are not the same purchase.
Who has to agree? All of them, by name, on paper. This is where the time goes. In a family holding there may be four or five people with an interest and at least one of them is usually working overseas or in Malé. Everyone will tell you he has no objection, and he probably does not. An absence of objection is not a consent. A transfer that rests on somebody who never signed is a problem that arrives years later, often after a building has gone up.
Where is the boundary? Measure it. Do not read it. In my experience the measured size and the recorded size disagree more often than they agree, usually by one or two hundred square feet, and usually because a wall was rebuilt at some point slightly off the line and nobody has thought about it since. Sort that out with the neighbour before the transfer, in writing, with the council aware. After the transfer it is your problem and your neighbour has had eleven years of use to point at.
Is there a road? There is often a track. A track that everybody uses is not necessarily an access that survives the day somebody builds a wall across it. Ask what it actually is.
What is standing on it, and was that ever recorded anywhere? An unrecorded building is not a disaster and it is a thing to know before you pay rather than after.
Do the services reach the boundary? Water and power stopping two plots short is a cost, and it is a cost that does not appear in the price anybody quotes you.
And what is owed against it?
What I will not do is print the procedure here, because there is not one procedure. The route depends on which of those interests is being transferred, the island council is involved in most of them, and the practice is not what it was five years ago. So on every instruction we establish what applies to that plot, on that island, at that time, and we write it down before anybody is asked for money. Then a lawyer carries it. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.
The last piece of advice is the one people resist most. The money moves last. Not a deposit to show good faith, not a part payment because the seller has an expense this month. Last, when the answers are in and the consents are signed. I have been asked to move it earlier perhaps forty times and I have never once seen a case where doing so would have made the outcome better.
Four months, usually. Occasionally two. It feels slow while it is happening and it is indistinguishable from fast once it is done.
