Advice about buying freehold and appealing against price quoted

[palomadove]

We want to buy the freehold of our leasehold house.

The price quoted by the company which owns it seems to be quite a bit more than we should pay.

Does anyone have any experience of appealing against the quoted price and perhaps taking it to tribunal?

Was it worth it? Looking at leasehold advisory service website, we'd need to pay a surveyor for an estimate of what the cost should be, then take the appeal from there.

The company is asking almost £4k including legal fees, while we think the cost should be around £2k, but that wouldn't include fees.

tia

so are you concerned about the valuation or the costs? e.g is the valuation 2k which you dispute and the costs also 2k which you dispute? you cant really challenge the valuation if you havent had your own.

To be honest, I think fees could come to far, far higher than #2k if you dispute it so I would take their offer and suck up the legal fees.

How long has your lease got left? When I owned a flat freehold I was told by a conveyancing solicitor that for the people who owned the leasehold to buy me out they'd need to multiply the yearly maintenance fee (which was £100) by the amount of time left on their lease (which was, at the time, 90 years) so they'd have owed me £9K so although I don't know the circumstances of your lease £4K plus fees sounds a bit of a bargain.

I have just started a similar procedure and have been told that there is a set formula for calculating the price of the freehold. Other than going to the tribunal I'm not sure who could work this out for you without incurring too much cost.

P.S. Yes I would be grateful if anybody could tell us if they appealed and what happened because I'm almost sure that I'm going to come up against this - our freeholder is an extremely hard nosed business woman and I'm expecting the price quoted to be more than it should be.

You can get a local surveyor who specialises in this field to work on your behalf if you want to get a fair(er) value. If you go to the LEASE website, they have a list of tribunals in your area (or you can sort by freeholder if it is a big company) and then choose one of the surveyors that helped in those cases. Multiplying by service charge isn't very accurate - we have a 999 year lease on our flat - I don't think the freehold would be worth the best part of #100k .

palomadove doesn't seem to have any problem with the price of the freehold, it's the fees she doesn't like so in her case there is no point employing a surveyor or going to tribunal as that will only prolong the process and rack up costs.

Thanks for all the replies.

In summary, I'm wondering whether the cost of taking an appeal is going to outweigh just accepting what seems to be an inflated price offered by the company which owns the freehold now.

From looking at the LEASE website they advise getting a surveyor to assess the value.

I guess I could contact a surveyor and ask how much they would charge for that assessment, and take it from there, but I'm interested in hearing from anyone here who might have actually gone through the process and knows what the pros and cons, and mainly the cost, was of taking an appeal.

Mutt - I may do what you did and try negotiating directly with the freehold company first as they wouldn't want the hassle of an appeal.

We're in a similar position to you, so haven't gone to tribunal but we are looking into the possibility. What I can tell you is that we paid just over £1000 two years ago to get a valuation from a surveyor - this was actually for two properties but within the same building so it wasn't a straight doubling of the cost of one. You could ring one or two to get an idea of costs, but they're fairly chunky. You will presumably need your own legal costs - again, we're looking at around £1500 plus VAT to get legal support for both properties (although our solicitors are fairly pricey but good IMHO, so it would probably be possible to get cheaper). Personally, I would think that you would be best to attempt to negotiate a lower price yourselves, as I suspect the costs involved would be considerable. But like you, I am hoping that someone will come along who has real experience of these things!

I think that sounds quite low!If you have less than 80 yrs on the lease you are liable for teh marriage value which is 50% of the amount your flat will increase by with the new lease.our neighbours tried to buy the freehold for their flat from us (basement flat)the lease was 72 years and their flat would have increased by 25k with the new lease so we would be owed 12.5k sadly they didn't go ahead!