Extending leasehold on flat

funnymonkey

Good morning.
I have a leasehold flat and wish to extend the lease as the current period is 90 years. I am not sure who to contact regarding this at first instance. Would it be the block management company?
Thank you

Sam_666

If you did some search on forum, you would have plenty answers on your Q.
Building management manage building, not lease. You would need to contact freeholder, who owns lease.

PropertyGuru_Wannabe

The block management building would have the details of the freeholder and the process in extending the lease as that is also when the freeholder starts to make money from the leaseholders.  Beware they will initially charge a lot so maybe consider enlisting a solicitor versed in property law if you are not familiar with the whole process.  Contact your block management for how to instigate the process and negotiations.

eddddy

In simple terms, there are 2 ways of extending a lease...

1. The informal route
2. The statutory route

For the informal route, you can tell your freeholder/landlord (maybe via the managing agent) that you want to extend your lease, and see if they will cooperate / negotiate with you.

If the freeholder/landlord is prepared to cooperate, often they will ask you to pay them a fee - to cover the cost of them obtaining a valuation for the cost of your lease extension.

But an informal lease extension has no 'rules', so an uncooperative /nasty freeholder might:

• Ignore your requests and not reply
• Propose a stupidly high price for the lease extension (but you can then attempt to negotiate them down)
• String you along and pretend that they will give you a lease extension - when they won't.
• Generally mess you about for as long as they feel like

But equally, a nicer freeholder might be very helpful and fair.



For the statutory route, you would normally start by instructing a solicitor and a valuer. The valuer would tell you how much you should expect to pay for the lease extension.

Then the solicitor would serve notice on your freeholder/landlord, and the process for agreeing a price and getting the lease extension would begin.

Your freeholder/landlord cannot generally stop a statutory lease extension from going through.


Here are some good places to start reading up:
https://www.lease-advice.org/article/lease-extension-of-leasehold-flats-the-two-routes/
https://www.lease-advice.org/advice-guide/lease-extension-getting-started/