lease says no pets but vendors have a cat

[gertrudestein]

We are trying to buy a flat - it's in a private block with a 150 year lease. We have just seen a copy of the lease and it says there are no pets allowed, but when we went to look round the flat we saw that the vendors had a cat.

We don't have any pets at the moment but would like to in the future. A few friends have said that it's 'just one of those things' and all leases are the same but everyone flaunts them. Can this possibly be true? WWYD?

Just came across this searching for something else about pets and saw that no one else had replied. We lived in a very similar block with the same rule in the lease. Many people had cats and even dogs. We sold to a woman with a cat who knew about the rule in the lease and felt confident to ignore it. The manager of the building who is very strict about almost everything else (eg, tying up your rubbish, not parking anywhere, not leaving pushchairs in the corridor) has said that he turns a blind eye to it and would only use the rule in the lease to get rid of a pet that was causing others a nuisance.

HTH

I act as a managing agent, and basically that's right. The terms of most leases say that you can't have pets, but the only time I would enforce that lease term would be if it becomes a nuisance to other leaseholders. Some big FH companies ask you to pay for permission to keep pets; they see it as another way to make money out of their leaseholders...

I think a cat would be OK in the future (hard to tell who it belongs to and they dont generally wander he corridoors!), but if you want a dog in the future, I'd think there could be many complaints about the noise and you'd be seen by everyone when you left the flat to walk it.