Leasehold - Working from home

YoungBlueEyes

Not quite art imitating life but - 

My neighbour spends a lot of his day banging away on his keyboard. We were talking over the fence this aft and he apologised for the noise - there’s a lot of ‘ripe’ language let’s say. “You facking donkey!!” is a particular favourite. As he was wearing wireless headphones I asked him if he’s a gamer and what’s he playing. Turns out he’s a coder, and couldn’t stop to chat because he had to be logged in and working for a certain number of hours a day. 

Somebody on a computer isn’t necessarily working, and all that would be needed should the ManCo knock on the door is the screen turning off. No biggie. 

If it were me I’d risk it. 

TheJP

I have WFH for the last 11 years and never have i had to declare it to the insurance nor have they asked if i work from home. Being employed by a business and WFH is not the same as running a business from your home, i know other colleagues that work from home and own a leasehold flat and they have no issues either.

letom

It’s always good to get differing views on topics, however as the poster above mentioned, going to managing agents or the mortgage provider is largely a waste of time and if anything might open up a can of worms.

The managing agent isn’t going to engage with someone who isn’t a leaseholder or a prospective leaseholder on matters relating to the lease, they would only do so via the lawyers and even so it’s the freeholder’s lawyer who would respond to these questions. Almost certainly the response from the freeholder would be “the lease says X”, they nor the managing agent will caveat the lease with “the lease says X but actually we don’t check”, why would they? Even so, if you try and get any information in a somewhat anonymous fashion anything the managing agent says (remember they are just an agent so what they say you should take with grain of salt anyways) wont be worth much given they would have no duty of duty nor would there be a presumption they should if a random person phone up and asked about WFH and the leade.

Like with all contracts (leases) what is important is what is written, whether it is actually actionable (just because something is in the contract doesn’t mean it would get past a judge) and most importantly whether someone would enforce it. Clearly the freeholder wouldn’t enforce this given the principles of these types of clauses in leases are to protect the rights of other leaseholders, no judge is going to say WFH as a software developer is a breach of the lease, again what would the freeholder gain from enforcing it in this case?

This WFH wouldn’t also invalidate any insurance, remember insurance is just a contract, it’s probably now considered presumed with building insurance that there is an element of WFH of this nature that an insurance company would find it might hard to invalidate a policy on these grounds…

Sunsaru

I haven't read all the comments so don't know if this is being said previously but if you are employed by Company X then Company X is legally your place of work, regardless of whether you work from home or not as such it should break any convenants. I checked this out during the height of Mambo 19.

LondonMoneySaver

Playing devil's advocate on the comment above "What would the freeholder gain from enforcing it in this case?", actually an unscrupulous freeholder (it doesn't take much googling to find examples), would have a nice windfall of several hundred £k if they were successfully able to bring forfeiture proceedings against a leaseholder.

Whether a judge would consider forfeiting someone's several hundred £k home for merely working from home is another matter. but again, no precedent i can see which confirms either way.

user1977

LondonMoneySaver said:

Playing devil's advocate on the comment above "What would the freeholder gain from enforcing it in this case?", actually an unscrupulous freeholder (it doesn't take much googling to find examples), would have a nice windfall of several hundred £k if they were successfully able to bring forfeiture proceedings against a leaseholder.

If it were that easy, why has nobody done it?

And even if working from home was breaching a lease, surely the initial step a leaseholder would take is simply to stop working from home? The lease isn't going to be forfeited summarily just because you've been "caught" breaching it once.

Titus_Wadd

Not the same scenario, but our NFH, who is also director of the management company, is always on the look out for new ways to harass us.  He tried to take action to enforce breach of covenants claiming we were running a business from our home during lockdown when DH and 2 of our kids were working from home.  Fortunately his own solicitor told him to grow up!  He's on his third firm of sols since then. 

Even if I were considering breaching a covenant (or lease condition in the OP's case) I wouldn't ask the management company or freeholder in advance whether an activity was okay or not. Maybe that's just me? It's impossible to judge how amenable the management company might be.  If you're not planning to run a business, and you're an employee tapping on a keyboard is just tapping on a keyboard as an employee.

OP let us know how it all pans out and good luck in your eventual new place.

NameUnavailable

LondonMoneySaver said:

Playing devil's advocate on the comment above "What would the freeholder gain from enforcing it in this case?", actually an unscrupulous freeholder (it doesn't take much googling to find examples), would have a nice windfall of several hundred £k if they were successfully able to bring forfeiture proceedings against a leaseholder.

Whether a judge would consider forfeiting someone's several hundred £k home for merely working from home is another matter. but again, no precedent i can see which confirms either way.

Amazingly when a huge number of us were working from home during lockdown, I didn't hear of anyone losing their home for WFH.

In fact I haven't heard of it full stop. Anyone got any examples of lease forfeiture for this reason? (not running a business from home which is different).