AmazingGrace Grace

Our local charity has found a property we wanted to buy (price agreed). The sellers wanted to charge us VAT on top of the sales price and insisted that the VAT is to be added. As a charity using the property wholly for charitable purposes, we were told we could claim back the VAT from HMRC. We were also told the best approach to this is to set up a new company which is a subsidiary of the charity and then use this subsidiary (which we would register for VAT to get the refund.). We have a subsidiary company set up already which we can use for this but is not currently trading or registered for VAT (we have never registered for VAT as a small local charity) Question: Can we get the VAT refund back? Is this the right approach in this situation ?.... is there anything else we need to be aware of. Kindly advice. Thanks.