Buying a flat with 90 years lease - What to look for?

Mokka

There is very useful info on lease-advice.org website regarding lease extension. I've bought a flat with a 92 lease and I just looked into extending it. Anything with a lease nearing 80 years you should be very wary of, as it is considerably more expensive to extend the lease below 80 years.

You can do a calculation of how much a lease extension would cost. It is your statutory right to extend the lease for another 90 years and there are no catches- you just need to follow the procedure correctly, engage a lawyer, valuer etc. The extension depends on how much the ground rent is.

If you do not extend the lease before the 80th year the flat will drop significantly in value.

davo75

As Mokka above says the value will drop significantly if the lease goes below 80 years, but also the cost of renewing it becomes incredibly expensive, I used this calculator to work out how much.

It looks like 82 years is the minimum you want to let it go under, after that the cost will be over £5,000 to renew.

Brown_Eyed_Girl

As other have said, the closer to 80 the more expensive and keep in mind you need to have lived there two years to be able to request the extension by statute. You can still ask in the meantime, there's just little you can do if they refuse.

Also check the ground rent and how it increases. mine has a trixy clause around the future ground rent = a proportion of the sale value. That's not been enforced but technically it could be, so working out if deed of variation is possible/necessary.