VERY URGENT - Freeholder fee for providing information

thecornflake

This is very urgent.

My solicitor has just told me that as part of the sale of our leasehold flat the freeholder is charging a fee for providing certain information (which I knew). However he is charging £150 + VAT per hour.

Is this reasonable? I'm thinking of challening it under the Supply of Goods and Services act.

lynzpower

good question

Ive had the same and I was going to ask later.

Is it fixed? Is it laid down in contract? If so is that contract a fair relectoin of costs?

Id be very interested to know your findings

Woby_Tide

on the other hand, can the sale proceed without the information and is £200 worth losing a house sale over?

They are gits though for this. Just make sure to make them earn their money in future by highlighting every maintenance issue to them

EdInvestor

thecornflake wrote:

Is this reasonable? I'm thinking of challening it under the Supply of Goods and Services act.

Depends what it says in your lease.

gil13

I suspect you may have to pay up, what is the information they need, are you sure you cannot provide it, management company perhaps?

thecornflake

Thanks for all your replies.

I spoke to a solicitor at the Leasehold Advisory Service. I had to repeat the figure twice to him. He said it's very unreasonable. Basically, the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act states in Schedule 11 here that a charge like this has to be reasonable.

He suggested not more than £75, and also he had never heard of an hourly charge for this before.

He suggested I -

1) Find out from my solicitors exactly what is required

2) Confirm this with the buyers

3) Work out a reasonble charge based on how much is required

4) Offer this to the freeholder

5) The last resort is challenging the charges using the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal but I think you might have to pay them first to do this.

prudryden

I would call the freeholder, which must be a company if they are VAT registered and get confirmation of the fee and exactly what it is for. It may include costs of photocoping, postage, one or more person's time, official fees etc.
Be pleasant, you don't want them to get mad and stall on delivery.

Cazza

Most freeholders do charge a fee for providing imformation to solicitors when you're buying a leasehold flat, but £150 + VAT does sound steep. Have you checked exactly how much they want to charge you? Usually the queries from the solicitor don't take an hour to sort, often only a few minutes, so it's possible you could actually pay much less. I'd say the average I've heard of is £15-25. HTH!

Cazza

Sorry, teach me to read the OP properly! This type of fee is usually higher when your selling rather than buying, so ignore the £15-25 bit!