Share of freehold, and buying the garden?

millardus

Hey all

We are considering an offer on a duplex apartment, which includes 2 bedrooms at the *garden* level. It is a share of freehold apartment, 3 other flats.

There is a shared garden at the back. The apartments are all around the £230k mark, if that means anything for the following question:

Has anyone successfully bought a freehold apartment, with shared garden, and THEN managed to secure the garden?

My wife and I would like to buy the garden at a later stage, so are interested to know what is involved in doing so. Presumably some formal negotiation with the freeholders, an assessment of the value of the garden and then going from there.

Is it a simple enough process once a value is agreed for the garden, and IF all freeholders agree to sell?

T

TBagpuss

it would be complicated by the fact that the tenants of the other flats presumably have rights to use the garden, so you would not only need to negotiate with the freeholder but also either wait until each of the other flats got a new tenant, so the freeholder could issue a different lease without including the garden, or get the freeholder to agree with each tenant to vary the leases mid-term, in which case there would be legal costs involved in varying the leases, and probably the tenants might want some compensation for agreeing the change.

how many flats are there? The lease for each flat would need to be changed, so it's likely to be quite expensive. if you want to go ahead, I would suggest that you talk to a specialist solicitor now, to get a rough idea of what kind of cost might be involved. I suspect that the answer may be that if having sole use of the garden is important to you, you should look for a flat which already has a separate garden.

Obviously, a lot depends on how many freeholders there are, how many tenants there are, (and whether any of them are the same people!)

Ivana_Tinkle

How sure are you that the other freeholders are willing to sell? There's a big difference between going from a flat with a shared to garden to no outside space at all. If it were me, I'd want a lot of money for my share of the garden, if I was willing to sell at all. Add on the legal costs and it could be a very, very expensive way to buy a garden!

cattie

Most flat owners will want to keep a share of the garden as it makes their flats much more sellable & in many cases more valuable with some outside space, even if it's shared.

So I think you'd have to be offering mega bucks to persuade any of the other freehold sharers to give up their stake in the garden to you. Then as others have mentioned, the legal costs relating to changing the leases etc. could be very costly, so not really financially viable unless you are extremely wealthy.

princeofpounds

As the others have stated the main problem you will face is that you would have to negotiate not only with the freeholder to buy the garden, but with all the other leaseholders to give up their rights to use the garden.

Administratively this would be a pain, and you may well find that you have to offer over the odds to please so many people, if you can negotiate at all.

Don't count on it.

propertyman

millardus wrote: »

Has anyone successfully bought a freehold apartment, with shared garden, and THEN managed to secure the garden?

T

Sigh not because there is no such thing as shared or share of freehold.

You will buy a lease for the flat, yeas you will, and together with that either join the other people who own the freehold, or the company that they own that does.

As to the garden if all leases show that the garden is shared in terms of a right to use, then all would have to agree to surrender that right and likely will ask for some cash.

Just proof that this idiotic idea of share of freehold causes problems by misleading people into thinking that they are burying something that does not exist and non existent issues.