Leasehold in the future?

MattMontreal

I’m wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of some informed writing on what might be the ramifications if there are serious changes to leasehold legislation in the future. 

For example, if I bought a leasehold flat today, how might my home owning experience change in 5/10/15 years if leasehold were to “disappear” or be substantially changed?

Matthew

BarelySentientAI

Anything could happen, depending what the changes are.

There will be no informed writing, only speculation or interest group arguments.

Herzlos

There's certainly nothing worth worrying about. Even if Leaseholds were to be suddenly disolve it'd just be the equivalent of forcing the leaseholder to sell you the lease for a nominal fee.

RiskAverse100

I think that any talk of 'abolishing' leasehold is really unhelpful, and both the Tories and Labour are guilty of doing so.

Reforming a system which everyone accepts has some clear deficiencies is one thing, but getting rid of it altogether?

Not a particularly good analogy, but look what is happening with vehicles.  Yes there are plans to prevent new petrol and diesel cars from being sold, but they are not being abolished.  It may be that, gradually, it will become harder and harder to own a petrol/diesel car and so eventually they may no longer exist.  But that will take a long, long time.

In fact, it is a really poor analogy.  Cars might only last 20 years and so phasing them out is a far simpler job than trying to change things made of bricks and mortar which are going to be standing for a lot longer.  And what about leases granted for 990 years?  But the analogy at least shows why politicians are sometimes being just a bit silly when they talk about 'abolishing' things.

It might be possible to enact legislation that required new blocks of flats to be sold as commonhold properties and you could also insist that when flat owners got together to buy their freehold then it somehow had to be converted to commonhold.  But I wouldn't want to be involved in drafting the legislation!  In any event, there are problems with the existing legislation relating to commonhold that would have to be ironed out first.

As far as existing leasehold flats are concerned, even if a government of whatever colour really wanted to phase out leasehold then it would take many, many decades to even make a small dent in the estimated 4.9m existing leasehold properties.

So I cannot imagine that you are going to find any informed writing anywhere on the subject as no-one would be able to say that they are 'informed'!

NameUnavailable

The reforms are around making leasehold fairer for the leaseholders - easier/cheaper to extend leases, longer term extensions, more rights around management of the building etc.

MattMontreal

It looks like the changes I was expecting to drag on forever have actually passed:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/leasehold-reforms-become-law

i guess the question now would be what impact it will have. Weirdly I don’t see any articles on any major media outlet when I search.