OH MY, The Most Stunning Beautiful Property

Captain_Mainwaring_2

penguine wrote: »

Yes -- they just need to get planning permission. It's been happening up and down our high street for the past few years -- as it's a good way for the freeholder to make more money. But I don't think it would be feasible in the property you're looking at.

The roof and the structure of the building should be your landlord's responsibility to repair (though you have to pay a proportion of the costs). So it might be worth asking when the roof was last repaired / replaced and what condition it's in now.

Our lease has a few funny conditions, including that we're supposed to keep our floors carpeted -- no doubt to prevent too much noise from carrying down to the flats below -- but the owner of the flat above us has put down laminate anyway. The lease is a bit daunting to read (and interpret) but overall there is nothing in it which has kept us from making any improvements we want to our flat.

How did you come to that conclusion? not all leases are the same and the freeholder almost certainly has no such right in this case.

The OP needs to read the lease carefully and see who is responsible for what. You can't just go making sweeping statements that the freeholder could build a multi storey car park on the roof if he got planning permission, and the OP has already posted enough of the lease to show it isn't the case.

matt99b

Got some new info on that flat...

Zoopla! http://www.zoopla.co.uk/
and
nationwide property value calculator http://www.nationwide.co.uk/hpi/Default.asp?calculate=true

both value the property at around 156k

Yet the estate agents have it on at 170k! Is that normal? Would an offer of £156k be cheeky?

Captain_Mainwaring_2

No, but not offering it would be foolish.

Offer them 147K5 and you owe me a pint -

You would get a place that you probably couldn't rent for the mortgage payments, so you really cannot go wrong.

See if you can get the lease varied to allow transfer "in whole or in part"
and if it goes pear shaped then you can flog the garage.

Lakey

I'm sure that the surveyors won't be far off that mark if you're very lucky, so rather than wasting your time with a higher offer and then finding the mortgage survey is lower then having to reduce , go in low now and stick.
Your ceiling is irrelevant, the mortgage will all hinge around the valuation, if that is low your deposit will have to increase.

Go in with your offer and stick to your guns, always wait until the next day before you reply or make any decision.

good luck

LillyJ

Zoopla for my house was accurate to within £1000 of what we paid for it, and it hadn't sold for 10 years before we bought it. I hadn't looked at it before I put the offer in but it would have been useful if I had I suppose.

sarah_elton

Zoopla values my flat at more than I thought it was worth now prices have dipped. Woohoo! I'm rich!

:rolleyes:

moggylover

matt99b wrote: »

We don't want to own the grounds the flat sits on. We do want to own the flat and have control over it. With leasehold we would have to ask for permission to do anything. We don't want to answer to anyone about our own property thank you very much!

The sellers may not have thought about the garage conversion; maybe they want to move somewhere bigger; maybe they couldn't afford it, who knows ; who cares. This has all been taken into consideration but ultimately doesn't affect our love of the flat. This thread isn't about that. This is about the leasehold.

The lease apparently they can only estimate it might cost around £8000 to extend by 90 years. Apparently to get a real quote will cost a lot of money. That's what the agents told us. But we don't want to do that! I don't understand why anyone would want to lease a property.

Not being funny Matt - but where do you get all this from? My first flat was leasehold, and above a bank, and part of a community of 6 flats above commercial premises. The lease is normally only 99 years at a time, so yours is by no means short-leased, and flats usually are leasehold as the actual building is divided and thus it would be difficult to own the lease outright, and it make joint maintenance issues more easily arranged.

I did not have to ask permission to do anything to my flat - although I suspect that you might have to in order to convert the Garage - but then planning permission might not be possible either.

Look into this further. My flat had about 70 years left on its' lease when I sold it and it gave me no problems selling it at all - and I had had to fully renovate it after buying it - all without having to get back to anyone to get permission.

Seriously, the first step on the ladder is never easy - cutting a whole range of properties out because of something as ordinary as a leasehold is silly.

Find out more about the lease/lessor and leasehold charge per annum. Then make a better informed decision - many of the poshest homes in London are only owned leasehold - because most the the freehold interest in those areas belong to the Duke of Westminster - so don't be put off unless there are unreasonable requirements in the lease.

moggylover

matt99b wrote: »

Just what we're trying to do!

But that is not where first time buyers start! Not in the real World - and not 30 years ago when I started out, and not even before that!

One starts at the bottom and works up - THAT is why it is a property ladder - lol.:rolleyes:

moggylover

Captain_Mainwaring wrote: »

Yeh, yeh, yeh, 20 years ago you could have bought a 4 bed detached house in half an acre and a new car for that much money, travel back in time and do it then.
It's like this - if you don't understand what leasehold is and what it means then better you don't buy it.

But then, they would not have the kind of salaries they have now either!

moggylover

PasturesNew wrote: »

Re chippy. Go when they've been open a few hours, check for extractor fans round the back. Find out the prevailing wind direction. Check the wind direction on the day you go. Open the windows and have a damned good sniff.

Last thing you need is finding out that they timed your viewings for when the chippy was shut. Or that usually the prevailing wind is in the other direction and you have to live with chip smells.

However, there can be plus points: once lived above a chinese restaurant in Chiswick for a while - and they were lovely and used to bring us up left overs at the end of the evening!

Only down point was that the smells were sometimes so mouth watering that I was always hungry!