Just curious about Shefffield and leasehold houses

Bluemeanie_2

Random question, I am purely just curious. I don't even live near Sheffield! But something I have picked up on in a few threads, and tried googling to no avail is, that a lot of houses in Sheffield area seem to be leasehold, anyone know why/the history behind this? I thought it might be to do with the industrial history of the city?

Anyone know?

propertyman

There are some strange people and strange ways outside of the M25......

There is a member here Jeffrey Shaw who is a conveyancing solicitor and practices in Sheffield and may know if you PM him.

poppysarah

New builds are often leasehold.

Council properties were sometimes sold off as leasehold.

cotleigh

We bought some little Victorian terraced houses in Sheffield some years ago, and I also remember being surprised and puzzled as to why they all seemed to be leasehold. I can only assume that when the city grew up during the Industrial Revolution, and local landowners sold land for housebuilding, they thought it was a good idea to sell their land on long leases rather than freehold. Perhaps thinking of their descendants in generations to come?

We get these stupidly small bills once a year from various freeholders for the Ground Rent (some of the amounts are so small that you wonder that the admin cost of invoicing, taking payments and chasing non payers is even worth it, like £3.27, £10 etc).

I suppose you could probably buy the freehold for not very much, but you'd spend more on valuers and lawyers fees than on the freehold itself.

I have not seen this situation with similar types and ages of houses in other cities - everywhere else we've ever bought, every house is a freehold. Only flats are leaseholds.

tunnel

Random question, I am purely just curious. I don't even live near Sheffield! But something I have picked up on in a few threads, and tried googling to no avail is, that a lot of houses in Sheffield area seem to be leasehold, anyone know why/the history behind this? I thought it might be to do with the industrial history of the city?

Anyone know?

Probably something to do with the church owning almost 2/3rd's of all land in Sheffield at some time in the past! Guess it was their way of taxing by keeping the leasehold. My business premises and all the ones surrounding me are leasehold to the church in sheffield

cotleigh

tunnel wrote: »

Probably something to do with the church owning almost 2/3rd's of all land in Sheffield at some time in the past! Guess it was their way of taxing by keeping the leasehold. My business premises and all the ones surrounding me are leasehold to the church in sheffield

Maybe.

Of the four houses we still have in Sheffield, at least one has Sheffield City Council as the freeholder, another is some individual bloke who sends out a bill for £3.xx each year, and another is some aristocratic estate, Duke of someone or other, can't remember exactly. Although I don't suppose the Duke or Duchess actually stuff the bills into the envelopes themselves.....

These are all Victorian "Coronation Street" type terraced houses around the Shoreham Street area of Sheffield.

So no "council estate" explanations for leaseholds, or private estate either.

They all front directly onto public roads, no communal gardens or anything shared at all.

Bluemeanie_2

I thought it was something along these lines. Many thanks for taking the time to respond.

Bluemeanie

Alias_Omega

My guess..

A good idea for a developing city would to be "lease" the land around the outskirts, enabling small temporary houses to be built for its work force. The houses could be leased for a short term of 50-100 years where they could be reclaimed/demolished for expansion.

Solves the ability to grow in developing times, and also allows the workforce to live local to the place of employment. Sheffield being big in manufacture, workforce was critical.

milliebear00001

Properties can be leasehold for all sorts of reasons. My mum and dad live in a Victorian terrace in Manchester, which was previously affiliated to the cotton mill at the top of their road. The land was owned by the mill, and the houses built on the land for the millworkers. The houses were leased to them. My parents used to pay a peppercorn rent to an individual in the street who administrated the freehold, but they don't pay anything now.

My house is freehold, but is surrounded by leaseholds. I live in a small Victorian-industrial town in Derbyshire, but our houses are almost all leasehold because the entire town used to be owned by the Dukes of Norfolk. He owned the land (since the middle ages) and then allowed leasehold properties to by built upon it, for which individuals then paid him rent. These were later sold on as 'leasehold property' with the land remaining his. Nobody currently charges even a peppercorn rent for this land though as there is no real, existing freeholder.

The Sheffield houses are more likely to be freehold because of the city's industrial past, but unless you have the deeds to homes it's hard to know for sure.

motherofstudents

It is very common in Manchester and Lancashire, in fact we have only ever lived in one freehold house. We pay £5 a year and a man comes to the house to collect it. They are normally long leases of 999 years and many are payable to landowners such as where we lived near Heaton Park, it was originally paid to the Earl of Wilton. It is just some bloke we pay it to now who lives in Bolton but if you have the house deeds, it is quite interesting to see who originally owned the lease.

Richard_Webster

I suspect it is simply a matter of local choice. Where I am in Southampton/Eastleigh a lot of development 1850-1910 was long leasehold. A landowner would lay out an area as a proposed "estate" and builders would approach him to buy plots or buy them at an auction. Typically a builder would buy 2-6 plots at a time and put up some houses paying around £2-£3 per year per plot as ground rent. He would then let out the houses on short term tenancies, in Eastleigh typically to workers at LSWR's railway works.

By the 1950s-70s the tenants had protection under the Rent Acts and as soon as they died the leseeholder would sell the part of the lease of the house in question to an owner occupier. Gradually they were all sold in that way and some people bought the freeholds. The ground rents became uneconomic to collect and so as people who held the freeholds became elderly it was too much trouble or they died and their families couldn't be bothered/didn't understand they could collect the £2-£3 per house and contact was lost. In a lot of cases the freeholders are unknown.

In Eastern Southampton there are largish stretches of land leased for 1000 years from the 1860s for use as brick yards with a rent of 1/- a year and 6d per year for every thousand bricks burnt on the land. There are hundreds of houses on this land now and Wimpeys even built a block of flats, but the descendants of the person who granted the leases (who until recently have had substantial landholdings in the Southampton area) deny all knowledge of ownership of the freehold so it is generally uneconomic for anyone to go through the statutory process to obtain the freehold. Fortunately those leases do not contain any restrictions on development, unlike later ones that often do, where in a few cases the freeholds are acquired by unscrupulous property companies out to make money out of people who have put up extensions without consent.

This kind of situation must be very common in Northern cities, but not seen so much in the South, and we regularly get out of area solicitors getting confused with our long leasehold houses. Certainly I know a little about Sheffield as my daughter owns a long leasehold house there. There are four houses within the same lease sharing a ginnel through the middle at ground floor level - the postman using it to deliver to the back doors.

As suggested, Jeffrey Shaw probably knows more about the detail in Sheffield and we await his comments.

What I think it quite immoral is the practice of some developers of building new houses and selling them on a leasehold basis, perhaps for only 99 years. I think in our area there would be resistance to it and builders could not get away with it - a buyer would ask why it was leasehold when another builder's development down the road was freehold.

If all the developers in an area sell houses leasehold, those who want a new build are stuck with leasehold, and later find they have to pay a lot of money to some horrid property company (to whom builder sells freehold after development has been completed) to buy the freehold 20-30 years later when the leases start to become unmortgageable. Such builders need to be exposed for their behaviour.