In a share of freehold with questions about lease extension

Brokenlynx

I'd completed purchase of a flat 8 months ago in London as part of a share-of-freehold that includes the other three flats in my building and myself.

The length of time remaining on my lease is 88 years. One of the share of freehold is in the process of selling their flat now.

It's been 8 months since I completed, so I'm under the two years of ownership required to begin a leasehold extension. 

According to the 'Schedule of notices of leases' document I hold following completion all of the other flats have between 87 and 88 years of lease remaining (the time of their last renewal was quite close together)

A couple of questions:

• Can the lease of my single flat be extended on its own, or does it have to be extended in conjunction with all of the other flats? (This would obviously be problematic if the process required convincing the other parties.

• What is the typical process and cost of getting a leasehold extension completed under these circumstances?

• How might the fact one of the share of the freehold is moving complicate this process?

• Are there any other considerations I should take into account in the next 1.5 years before I'm able to consider an extension?

eddddy

Perhaps the sensible approach would be to do the following:

• All of you should agree to extend your leases now - probably to 999 years
• You should share the legal costs of doing this between you
• (There is no 2 year ownership requirement for doing this.)

The 2 years ownership you mention relates to "Statutory Lease Extensions" - that's not what you want to do.

A solicitor might charge £1k to £2k to do a single lease extension - it might work out much cheaper per lease, if you do all 4 at the same time.


Step 1 is to get all your joint freeholders to agree to this. If they don't agree, things could get very messy and more expensive. (In that case, you might have to resort to doing an expensive and complex "statutory lease extension".)

NameUnavailable

I never understand why when people gain share of freehold they don't extend to 999 years at the same time.

As it stands, the other parties to the freehold could demand market value from you to extend, although in effect you would only pay 3/4 of that as you own 1/4. They would also then have to do the same if/when they wanted to extend.

I expect the party who are trying to sell will soon realise that the lease length might be a problem for prospective purchasers and mortgage companies.

It would be a good time to suggest to your neighbours that you all agree to extend now and share the costs (and ground rent is peppercorn).

Brokenlynx

NameUnavailable said:

As it stands, the other parties to the freehold could demand market value from you to extend, although in effect you would only pay 3/4 of that as you own 1/4. They would also then have to do the same if/when they wanted to extend.

Would that make sense though, from the documents I received during the conveyancing process all of the other share of freehold have between 87-88 years remaining, all of the leases were conferred within roughly an 8 month p

I expect the party who are trying to sell will soon realise that the lease length might be a problem for prospective purchasers and mortgage companies.

The party that is trying to sell has probably found a buyer (according to the sign out front) so I'm guessing it would be around 3 months before they're leaving, they're also an older person so I suspect an extension isn't really relevant to them at the moment.

It would be a good time to suggest to your neighbours that you all agree to extend now and share the costs (and ground rent is peppercorn).

Would you think it's worth planting the seed amongst the other two freeholders now to hopefully get the ball rolling once the new freeholder has joined?