Does anyone own a leasehold property?

[XxLondonxX]

Hi, would love some honest advice. We have found a property we love but it is a leasehold property. I feel very wary of buying a leasehold as I don't know much about it.
Does anyone/ has anyone ever owned a leasehold and what is your experience please?

We bought one over 30 years ago, after a couple of years we bought the freehold, it cost us around £500.

I own a leasehold flat outright (mortgage paid) and I recently extended the lease to 99 years. It was 99 years when the flats were built in 1987. It was a low five-figure sum to extend the lease but I consider it an investment in the property as leasehold properties gradually depreciate as the number of years on the lease decreases.

I own a leasehold flat which is part of a house split into 2. It's fine. We are near London and I can't afford a whole house. I have to pay about £1000 a year to the freeholder for service charge, sinking fund and insurance. It's gone up about £200 a year in total in the 15 years I've lived here.

I own a leasehold flat. It’s a nightmare and the building management costs have increased 300% over 5 years (with reasons, but still). I now pay more on service costs than on my mortgage.

I wouldn’t buy leasehold now unless there was an option to buy the freehold or there was no requirement for service charge costs.

Is it a leasehold flat or one of those recent newbuild houses or something else? What's the length of lease (unexpired)? What's the management situation? How much is the ground rent and management fees? What does it cover? For maintenance - what needs doing or has been done recently? Does any of the management fee get paid in to a pool to pay for maintenance? It's often called a sinking fund. If so, how much is currently in the fund? Are any of the other leaseholders in arrears on their payments or in dispute with the management company or freeholders? That's the sort of thing you need to know.

You may be able to buy the freehold - I've done that in the past but it was easier because there were only 2 flats and they didn't make us force their hand. We set up a company to own it jointly, and the other leaseholder was lovely and easy to deal with.

I've owned 2 leaseholds and they've both been fine, but when you get problems it can be a nightmare.

ETA: By 'maintenance' I mean exterior, roof and common areas - things that the management company or freeholder is responsible for.

I own a leasehold house. I bought 40 years ago with a 999 year lease. Ground rent is £12 per year

We have a LH purpose-built maisonette (Edwardian) one of just 2 in the terraced building, adjacent front doors.
However we did eventually buy the FH, since there were a lot of problems with the purchase, because of a supposedly absentee freeholder. (He wasn’t, just hiding under another name because of debts attached to the FH.)

Ground rent is very low and maintenance charges (except for anything within our own) have over 10 years been nil.

There are a lot of similar properties in that neck of the woods (SW London) and ground rent/maintenance charges are typically way lower than for flats in blocks, especially new ones, and any with lifts. IMO they’re often a better buy than anything in a block - they often come with some outside space, too.

Checking length of lease is very important (estate agents are too often either clueless on this, or vague, as if it’s a minor detail!) - personally I’d want 95 years as a minimum. Extending a lease gets a lot more expensive once it drops below 80 years.

Where I live (NW) there are a lot of leasehold houses with 999 year lease. The lease is £12 a year and it’s a complete non issue. Leasehold flats are different though as the leaseholder is responsible for repairs of common areas. Also could be a problem if the lease is short (less than 100 years)

I always avoided leasehold, always seems like you 'sort of' own it. As above check all the costs, length of leasehold, and be very wary of flats in blocks. Could you buy the FH and for how much?

How long is the remaining lease? What type of property is it? Where (roughly) is it?

For instance, leasehold flats in London are bog standard. But I wouldn't buy on with fewer than 100 years left on the lease. Although you can extend leases, but it costs ££

My old house was leasehold - it was fine. You just have to read and understand the terms of the lease as they all vary. Mine was about 89p per year for 800+ years! Obviously not a problem. They kept writing to me asking if I wanted to buy the leasehold for a grand - no thank you I will keep on paying my 89p thank you very much. I sold the house with no problems.

However I understand there are many new build houses being built that have much higher lease payments and they can sometimes have clauses in them to say that they will double every 10 years etc. I wouldn't touch those with a bargepole.

Thanks for the advice. It's a house leasehold not a flat. I think most the in the area are leasehold to try and control people from adding extensions to the historic houses. The ground rent is 0 but I'm wondering if they can change this without warning?

I own a leasehold and want to get rid of it. No management company or fees as the leaseholders self manage and self repair but the other leaseholder refuses to contribute to repairs or do any upkeep to the block. It's a nightmare.

Mine’s a leasehold, I pay about £1 year for ground rent, no service charge. I’m not even sure who I pay it to. It’s some condition of the house, it’s a really old house.

I have owned 3 leasehold houses. Very usual in the North West.
Two were older houses with no ground rent being collected.
The last one was a new build when we bought it. Ground rent £100 per year. Never increased. We eventually bought the leasehold as we wanted to make some changes to it and didn’t want to have to worry about any permissions that might be needed.

It is not uncommon for houses to be leasehold in the NW where I live. After 4 previous houses we have just recently moved into our very first freehold house.
We had no issues or problems. The annual rent was minimal - I think £28 a year was the highest.
The only leaseholds I would avoid are short ones, ones with high annual rents (more likely on new builds) or flats.

until recently owned a leasehold flat in London, freehold owned by council. It was fine - yes we had to pay service charges but the council was good at maintaining the building and grounds. Was a bit slow to sell but fine. Leasehold can mean many different things - you want a long lease and visibility of what the services charges are. I don’t like this attitude of ‘never buy leasehold’, unfortunately that’s not an option for many

How long is left on the lease is really important, also buy the deeds & check carefully what's on them if you haven't done this already.

Also my first house had an absent freeeholder as they had been dead for about 100 years! We had to take out an insurance policy which cost about £200 to protect against any potential problems that could happen regarding the lease. There might be an option to do something similar.

We bought a leasehold house with an old fashioned lease, the £4 a year type and we bought the lease of the company. The lease cost £700. We could have bought it off the company directly and literally paid the £700 but we instructed a solicitor to over see it and their fees cost £1200.
There's lots of stipulations in a lease, for example you're not meant to do any alterations without asking permission and paying a fee. You can't alter the boundary so for example you wouldn't be able to remove some wall to add a drive. Lots of leases don't allow you to have pets etc. however a lot of people don't actually abide by this 😂😂

Impossible for us to say, you’d need to study the terms of the lease in order to determine what they can and can’t do.

As mentioned above, it sounds like yours is a historic lease which was put in place for genuine reasons, rather than one of the more modern leases put in place simply to extract as much cash as possible from you.

However I’d still be wary. There are companies that specialise in buying up old
leaseholds and exploiting the terms as much as possible to make money. Personally I’d never buy a leasehold property. If spending all that cash on a house I don’t want to remain beholden to someone else.

Really depends on the property and details of the lease. Is it long? Is it shared by owners or owned by separate company? What are the terms of ground rent increases? What is record of calculations for service charge? Does the service charge include things you value or dont want to pay for eg concierge?

All questions relevant to a leasehold flat. However the OP is talking about a house, which is a different kettle of fish.