even if you have a lawyer's letter, a sheet of paper isn't enough protection for a few hundred thousand ringgit. in desperate times, people are willing to run for even 50k, so the risk is always there.

they have the title, and all you have is a power of attorney. they can sell at any time without your knowledge. it is illegal, but then again they can always run.

usually for this kind of scenario, the property will be sold at below its market value, due to the nature of the transaction.

when you buy below market, you are half way to making money.

some properties do have restrictions such as the owner cannot dispose of it for the 1st 5 years etc. i suspect this could be the case here.

a power of attorney is basically the seller holding all the rights to the property, but giving to you the power to sign all documents on his behalf. to strengthen your position further, you could do a declaration of trust, where the seller declares that although the property is in his name, he is holding it on trust for you, and you are the true owner.

however, if the seller decides to go behind your back and sell the property off to a 3rd party, the 3rd party is not bound to do any form of investigation into whether the seller has given powers of attorney or declared trusts over the property.

the owner gets his money, runs, and you see a lawyer, sue him for breach of trust, get judgement in the court, and cant find the owner to get your money back.

then you might get depressed and start doing drugs, and listen to michael learns to rock. it doesn't get any worse than that.

it's like this - if there is a master title, meaning the developer has not subdivided the titles yet, the registered owner of the big piece of land will be the developer. developers are under a duty to apply for subdivision, and once that is done, they will get the individual/strata titles out, and give them to the owners (the person who signed the s&p) or their banks.

there is no situation where the strata title is out but the developer holds on to it.

if you are the owner in the s&p or title, and you declare a trust for someone else, that person in law becomes the owner. however, in practice, the person whose name if on the s&p or title can still go out and sell the property off.

Dude, please stop misleading everyone

A trust can be declared by anyone in favour of anyone.

For a Deed of Absolute Assignment, you don't need any "stamped/chop" and signature from the bank.

The stamp duty for a Deed of Assignment is 1% for the first 100k, 2% up to 500k and 3% thereafter. I will gladly give you RM1k to stamp my Deed of Assignment, you can keep the change.

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Added on August 18, 2008, 3:24 pmyes, the strata title is the individual title, but for non-landed properties.

the master title will be subdivided into individual titles by the developer.

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Added on August 18, 2008, 3:26 pmthe deed of assignment is sufficient to protect your interest. it protects the interests of many people. however, this is where the developer has been given notice of the deed of assignment. if there is a restriction against the transfer of the property, it will be an invalid assignment, and it will be pointless.

it all depends on the reason behind the inability to assign the property.

This post has been edited by johnsonm: Aug 18 2008, 03:26 PM

agape_ian, assuming the proclamation of sale is in order, and the bank has not lost any of their security documents, then it shouldn't be a problem. however, you should also note the restrictions on the title to the property.