drawbacks of leasehold property?

Scully38

Jeffrey_Shaw wrote: »

P could tell V (owner of leasehold) that P will buy leasehold if V serves Notice of Claim (for the f/r) on L (the reversioner).
The leasehold contract stipulates that, on completion, V will assign to P the benefit of the Notice.
On completion, V executes a Deed of Assignment in P's favour. P serves on L Notice of Assignment of the Notice of Claim [still with me, here?] and P can then press ahead without waiting for two years.

I didn't realise that to buy a house I needed to learn algebra!!!

DVardysShadow

Scully38 wrote: »

I didn't realise that to buy a house I needed to learn algebra!!!

That is not algebra, you philistine, it is predicate calculus

Scully38

DVardysShadow wrote: »

That is not algebra, you philistine, it is predicate calculus

calculus/algebra

potato/ po-tah-to

:P

Ruda

evoke wrote: »

- Ground rent.

- Service charges.

- Major repairs every few years (in which you have very little say about the cost which can run into thousands)

- Scummy people living above/below you

- Hard to sell if not many years left on lease

- Very expensive to extend lease

- You are effectively renting it

- A lot more restrictions on what you can and cannot do in/on the property

- Much harder to sell than a freehold and, surprisingly, more expensive to sell in terms of the various fess you have to pay

Not many advantages, to be honest, other than it'll be considerably cheaper in the short term to buy than a freehold would be.

with all of this in mind... is it possible to find a flat to buy that is freehold?

DVardysShadow

Ruda wrote: »

with all of this in mind... is it possible to find a flat to buy that is freehold?

You would not get a mortgage on it if you found it.

Gentoo_2

As a balance....

There are some advantages to leasehold by the way. I will list some below:

For flats/apartments
There is a clear agreement about what proportion you pay if any urgent work needs to be done on the building.
There are rules in place to stop someone making changes to their flat that may devalue yours.
There is statutory protection, although a lease is a contract, many of the conditions are governed by law agreed by parliament. Owning a leasehold flat is considered more towards 'owning' than 'renting' in terms of the protection you have.
If you are single and 'time poor' it means that someone else deals with the maintenance, gardening, buildings insurance, building security etc.
There is a process by which you can complain about neighbours via official channels and a set of rules you can refer to. This is especially important if you are buying in a block where there may be many rented properties. (although obviously polite discussion is always the best step).
The mortgage company will probably require a flat is leasehold.


For other property
In some areas the leasehold is simply a way of passing down rules and regulations that were required when the land was bought, or planning permission was given. This could be a good thing. It could give confidence that there are limits to how the area could change.


Personally I see that the UK could head towards a property market where there is not really that much difference between leasehold and freehold. There are already restrictions on what changes you can make to freehold property, the extra restrictions placed upon leaseholders are usually for the protection of the overall building and the residents quality of live. The service charge is basically a charge for management of the communal and external parts of the building. If you own your own house you would still have to pay buildings insurance, you would still have to pay for any remedial work and you would still have to pay for maintenance of your garden (either in time or money).

If the question was 'what is better flats or houses' then I imagine that most people would prefer a house. But when it comes to 'leasehold vs freehold' I would tend to agree with the mortgage companies that freehold is best for houses, leasehold for flats.

If I were looking at a leasehold house I would want to know why it was leasehold.

Remember that even freehold houses have restrictions depending on the local area. As anyone who has lived in the New Forest would know, you don't have total freedom to do anything you want.







Note that all I have stated above is based on my understanding after doing some research during my own property search. So of course caveats apply and you may need to confirm your particular situation with your solicitor.

pinkteapot

BitterAndTwisted wrote: »

The vendor knows exactly how many years are left on the lease, Everyone can count back from a hundred unless they are three years old.

Not all leases are 100 years. I owned a flat which had 981 years remaining of a 999 year lease.

It never bothered me that the property was leasehold. The fact it was leasehold didn't cause me any problems. When buying I checked how much the service charge had been in each of the last few years, and how long was on the lease.

While there I replaced the windows. I needed the freeholder's permission to do this but one email and it was sorted.

The block was maintained by a managing agent who were pretty decent - things got fixed in good time, communal areas were cleaned weekly and gardens were maintained well.

One thing to look at is the service charge accounts and where money accrues for major work. Of the service charge I paid, around 20% went into a slush fund for things like external repainting which was done every five years. This meant that we didn't get any extra bills on top of the service charge. With some leaseholds you can get a bill out of the blue for work that can run into thousands because the freeholder hasn't budgeted like this.

Just had to point out that not all leaseholds are the devil's work. My flat felt like my home - I never felt like I didn't own it. And flats are cheaper than houses - it was what I could afford at the time.

For an equivalent sized house, a leasehold one should be cheaper than a freehold.

And re flats, you can get some that are "share of freehold" so that you and all the other owners jointly own the building (rather than a third party).

MrsJ2008

My house is leasehold, we pay £4 a year ground rent and it's got something like 970 years left on the lease.

Ask the sellers if they will let you have a copy of the lease so you can see what it includes or ask who the leaseholders are and contact them direct for information.

Ours has a stipulation that the building can't be changed into a business or a pub to keep the beauty of the area. We have a shared driveway and we can't rent out our house. These were the only things that we thought were important.

We plan to buy the leasehold (approx £1500) even when we do this ours have a covenant on it to say that we have to keep the property as a house..... not a problem to us

DVardysShadow

MrsJ2008 wrote: »

... We plan to buy the leasehold (approx £1500) even when we do this ours have a covenant on it to say that we have to keep the property as a house..... not a problem to us

Wash your mouth out. You intend to buy the freehold - you already own the leasehold.

A few weeks ago there was another thread involving leasehold and the inheritors selling the property on and getting in a huge row with a greedy charity. it took about 2 or more pages of discussion to clarify that the leaseholder had bought the freehold.

MrsJ2008

lol.... freehold, you know what I meant