Talk to me about leasehold..

Premier wrote: »

In response to the OP, the difference is you own the property but not the land upon which it sits. You lease the land from the landowner.

The technical difference isn't that simple either.

If you "own" the land (freehold) you hold an estate in fee simple. That means there is no time limit on your tenure, you can alienate the land (sell or give it away) or mortgage it. All land is held of the Crown, there is no allodial title in England & Wales. There is some allodial titled land in the Shetlands, from memory, as they didn't have the same feudal inheritance which lead to the estate in fee simple idea.

There are four basic common law system restraints on an estate in fee simple - tax, compulsory purchase, escheat, and rule of law (police power).

Tax, compulsary purchase, and rule of law are relatively obvious. Escheat happens mostly now in bankruptcy cases, where an official receiver declines to accept a freehold held by the bankrupt. It is the escheated, and vests in the Crown via demesne.

Leasehold is time limited. For many houses, the lease will have been granted for 999 years, so even if it is a Victorian semi, you are unlikely to be in a position to care about the expiry date.

In general terms, a person will see a significant difference between buying a house on a 999 year lease, and renting a house on a 6 month AST. But both are leases.

A lease can be a fixed-term tenancy (for a set period), a periodic tenancy, or a tenancy at will.

There used to be other forms of land tenure as well, most were abolished by the 1925 Property Acts. Copyhold was common in medieval times - it meant holding land by manorial custom. Most copyholds were turned into leases in the 18th - 19th centuries, and the concept abolished in 1925. Leases for life were converted into 90 year leases in the 1925 Acts.

There was also the concept of estates being entailed. An estate of land could be granted to X, and the heirs of his body / heirs male / heirs female, all types of things. It lead to the situations such as that in Pride and Prejudice, where Mr. Bennett's estate was in tail to a male heir, and his daughters couldn't inherit it. The entail idea came from De Donis Conditionalibus, a late 13th century statute. It was abolished in law in 1925, but still exists in Equity to some extent. The length of time an estate can be entailed is limited, to avoid property being held for a long time by the wishes of a "dead man's hand".

From the time of the Edward I statute of Quai Emptores, when land was sold or passed on, the duties and rights went with it. This meant that if duties or rights attached to a bit of land, you could tell who was entitled to exercise it by finding out who the owner was. Thus, if you buy a house with an easement (right of access, for example) over neighbouring land, the easement comes with the house, and doesn't stay with the previous owner.

Premier wrote: »

True, but I was trying to keep things simple for the OP, who by their own admission knows "between little and nothing about this sort of stuff"

But the OP is now considerably better informed :T

Troubled_Joe wrote: »

It certainly is. In my area (Lytham St.Annes) the majority of property is leasehold.

It seems to scare the hell out of solicitors acting on the other side from areas where it is rarely encountered.

PS. To teh OP - if it's a big problem for you then get the office copies and find out who the freeholder is. Contact them and ask how much they would sell for. As a rule it'd be between one and five thousand pounds although if you don't plan on breaching any of the covenants I would personally bother.

When I lived in the North West almost everything was leasehold. The older stuff on 999 years and the newer stuff on 125 years.

Now I'm back in the south leasehold is pretty much unheard of.

Provided the lease is a decent length it makes no practical difference to your ownership.

My neighbour and I are in dispute with another neighbour over a 24-ft strip of land that runs alongside my property and serves as an access road for my neighbour and the guy we are in dispute with.
Our houses are freehold, and the boundaries are clearly marked on our deeds. The strip of land is the issue, as the guy we are in dispute with claims he owns a 99-year lease on the 24-ft strip. He has erected a fence to bar my neighbour from entering a plot he has bought on the other side of the 24-ft strip.
My neighbour and I both possess a copy of a lease dating back to 1922, at which time my house was the only one in existence and the land on which the other 2 have been built was a paddock behind it. We strongly suspect this is the lease our neighbour claims he owns, as he won't show it to us. The lease only covers the land on which our houses were built, however, not the 24-ft strip, but it does give the leaseholder 'right of way for all purposes' over the strip. We think that our neighbour believes this gives him the right to claim that he owns a lease on the strip, which in our view is untrue.
How do I find it when my house became freehold, as this would surely render the lease invalid/ obsolete/ irrelevant?
Secondly, the strip of land - which is at the heart of the dispute - is described as a 'Private Road' on the 1922 lease. Noone knows who owns it, and both of my neighbours have placed adverts in the Western mail asking for anyone with an interest in this road to come forward. Noone has.
How do I go about finding out who owns it? And if ownership can't be established, does it become the property of the people who own the land on either side? i.e the three of us?
Any advice on how to proceed would be much appreciated, as we don't want this to turn ugly!

Really the estate agents can't afford to be fussy these days. If OP wants to know the length of the lease and the ground rent and even to see a copy of it then I'd say the agents would be stupid not to comply.

I totally agree.

How long has the property been on the market for where a HIP doent need to be provided. On this note OP, I hope you would not considewr paying anything neart AP on it.

Im so surprised about the amount of leaseholds! You learn something new every day. Id never heard of it in Manchester area where im from, and everything housewise in london Ive known of has always been free.