extending a lease - can anyone recommend surveyor/solicitor in London?

[levantine]

We are selling our flat but we may need to extend the lease, or at least cover the costs of our buyers

Has anyone done this and can recommend someone to help us?

We have just extended the lease on ours. Do you know how many years remain on your lease? If it's under 80 you probably should extend. We used a surveyor called Wilson Dunsin as he covered our local area - he provided a fairly substantial breakdown of the valuation for a lease extension. However, we had substantial additional costs - our solicitors, the landlord's solicitors, and their surveyor. All in all, it cost about £2000 on top of the lease extension itself (actually £4000 in our case, but we did two at the same time). We opted not to use the surveyor to negotiate the price, as the fees he wanted were more than we realistically thought we could hope to shave off the lease price, so we asked our solicitor to put our figures to the landlord for us. It may have cost us in terms of the final price we paid, but I think would still have been cheaper than paying the surveyor to negotiate for us.

That's helpful. It's 84 years, so we may not have to - some viewers have asked others haven't. Do you mind if I ask how long your lease was and how much it cost to extend?

Ours was down to 76 years (actually, it had just ticked below 76 years). The property was valued at around £110-£115k and the lease extension was a shade over £5k. The ground rent on ours was £100, but rising every 33 years - and as there is nil groundrent on the new lease, the cost associated with this part was fairly chunky. We've extended the lease by 90 years so it's up to 166 years now.

So you have to compensate the landlord for the loss of groundrent, is that right?

So complicated!

Yup - there are several bits to the payment, but one of them is to pay them the value of the ground rent that they would have received if you had stuck with the old lease, but the amounts are reduced for each year further away until the payment would be due, so, for example, £100 ground rent next year would be more valuable to the landlord than the £100 ground rent they would expect to receive in 20 years time, which would be more valuable than the £100 ground rent in 40 years time. There are formulae which calculate all this. Then there is an amount which recognises the value of the property that would revert to the landlord at the end of the lease if you didn't extend - but on an 84 year lease that probably wouldn't amount to much. Finally there is the 'marriage value' (but that only applies to leases under 80 years) which shares out the increase in value that the leaseholder gains with what the freeholder loses (I think). This can be chunky, but as it wouldn't apply until the lease is under 80 years, you're just in the clear on this. However, anyone looking to buy who know about these things will be aware that they would have a limited time in which to extend the lease before this did become an issue.

I should add I have gleaned all the above from various online resources, so please take what I say with a generous pinch of salt in case I say something wrong!

Thanks - this is all ringing bells from my googling! Will take proper advice obv.

if it s 84 years then imprortant to buyer that notice is served for lease extension - they can then take over the negotiaions.

so you could serve notice to landlord (as you been tehre more than two years presumably) then this can be passed on to buyers as work in progres as it were.

to give example - on two similar flats same block - lease extension premium for one flat when it was 82 years to go was 9,500

for second flat with 78 years (below the magic 80 years) - £18,500

doing it before it reaches 80 years makes a big difference in premium - both incurred costs up to 5000 but depends on surveyors fees etc some charge more than others and this is in london

(value of flats was 275 - 300,000

I see - didn't realise they could take over, okay.

Thank you