Buying flat - but there are issues!

anniemals

Hello all! Would very much appreciate any advice you can give.

We have been looking for a property for a while now, and had to get back on the horse after one fell through. We have now found another flat which ticks almost all of our boxes internally, but there are issues.

First, the garden is communal. This would be okay, but two of the current tenants (there are four flats, all owned by Hyde Housing Association and rented out) of the other flats have informally divided it to give them their own private sections. The garden is also not well maintained - it is overgrown, and there are broken pieces of furniture discarded in it. For £1,100 in service charge a year, I would expect better!

Second, the Housing Association gets terrible reviews on Trustpilot, so I am concerned that the building will not be well managed, and any issues with other tenants will not be resolved quickly.

However, there are also many positives. The inside of the property is exactly what we are after, there is no chain, and it is well within our budget. It also seems as though the freeholder is slowly moving out each tenant, redoing the flats and selling them as leasehold. This flat is the first to go on the market.

I am not sure what to do. I appreciate I can’t expect perfection, but the garden concerns me. I would make our offer conditional on formal division of the garden, but the flat is popular so I expect I will be told to sod off. I am also concerned about high service charges for no apparent reason.

I would very much appreciate any advice you guys might have.

SavingPennies_2

I wouldn't bank on the other tenants moving out anytime soon.. The garden situation is odd and would concern me too, so does your flat have a quarter too tat is currently been left unused?

theoretica

As the first flat to be sold, with an informal division of the garden, you could ask the seller/freeholder if they would make the division formal and sell you 1/4?

A block of flats the housing association is selling - why, and will they want to make the block attractive to the next purchasers (and in future at 1/4 your expense?) or lose interest?

Schwarzwald

Have you tried speaking to the other tenants to see what the informal agreement between neighbors is? Does your flat also have a section?

if you have your section, wouldnt mind the overgrown bit much, you can make it nice yourself.


i dont know the housing association, but Trustpilot et al, typically attracts more negative than positive feedback. When was the last time you went the extra mile to post a positive review on a business? And how many complaints have you raised instead when you were annoyed?

canaldumidi

Personally I'd walk away.

I suspect the HA isn't going to care or do much about the garden. And forcing removal of the fencing and cleaning up of the debris is not going to make you popular with your new neighbours. And once the garden is again 'openplan', whois going to maintain it? It's always goijng to be an issue unless you take on the full gardening role (which the other tenants might not like).

No. Either decide the flat is ideal and worth buying, but accept that you're never going to use/maintain the garden, or if the garden is important to you, find another property.

bouicca21

I’d want to firm up the ‘informal’ division of the garden.  Is it binding?  

My small block has a similar service charge.  The management company are incredibly parsimonious and take a lot of pushing to do anything other than the basic everyday stuff.
  

As far as the (huge) communal garden is concerned, the management company simply arranges for  the grass to be mown and leaves tidied. I and the other ground floor flat both have direct access to the garden and we each have a small piece of garden demised to us.  Over and above that  I maintain the large communal flower bed because I couldn’t bear looking at the weeds.  It would be nice if others helped but the reality is that no one much cares and the garden is hardly used - not even by the family with two small children.