Deed of Variation

[theheatherjane1]

Morning

We're selling our flat and knocked down a wall years ago.
We have been asked to provide a plan of the new layout, drawn by a surveyor, attached to a deed of Variation.
I believe this is something we need to ask our Freeholder to do but that we'll have to pay for.
Has anyone done this and knows how long it may take and roughly how much it may cost?

Thanks in advance

Did you get permission to knock down the wall at the time? You usually get that then

Permission from who? The freeholder?
I did but I never received anything.

Not sure but we owned a flat and if the guy downstairs knocked a wall down our flat (above) would have caved in.

Surely you would have legal permissions, drawings and hired a builder to do all the work and have this to hand to present now.

Or did you just knock a wall down and hope for the best?

It's not very clear from your OP

Thanks for your informative response.

I agree with Stiickemup, you could be in a difficult situation if you didn't get permission from the Freeholder. Asking for permission isn't the same as receiving it.

The Freeholder still owns the building when you buy a Leasehold flat. You own the right the live in it, but the Freeholder still owns the building and any structural changes need their permission.

You could find that in asking your Freeholder for a deed of variation now, you find yourselves having to reinstate the wall if the Freeholder says no

It's not a deed of variation - what the buyer is asking for is whether you got a licence for alterations. In your lease there will be a clause about what alterations you cannot do at all, what you can't do without consent and what you can do without consent. If you should have asked for consent then ideally there will be a licence to alter. You may just have a letter from the landlord saying that you can go ahead (though logically that should have been in response to something from you with details of what you were going to do).

If you didn't get this at the time, you are technically in breach of the lease so the way to "put it right" is to ask for retrospective consent. It's very unlikely that you won't get this assuming that the work was done properly but you'll need to pay the landlord's costs for the licence and the costs of its surveyor/agent checking the plans. It really depends what sort of organisation the freeholder/managing agent is as to what the costs will be: a bit of a finger in the air but it could be about £2-2,500 plus VAT roughly?

Hahah! Well good luck OP