Putting a leasehold property into joint names

[PinkSparklyPussyCat]

Our maisonette DH’s name (there is a good reason for this). I’m about to inherit enough money to pay off the mortgage and we will obviously then want to put it into both names. The problem is it’s leasehold and I’ve read that we may need to get the freeholder’s permission to do this. Does anyone know if this is true?

I’m worried we’ll run into problems as the freeholder can be a bit funny about things, and we have a short lease (58 years) that we can’t afford to extend at the moment and pay off the mortgage and the mortgage is the priority. Can he say we can’t make any changes without extending the lease first?

Thanks in advance

Once you renew the lease how much of your mortgage will you be able to pay off? Any overpayment shoudl reduce the interest repayments so you still have a mechanism for saving to pay off the rest.

We’ll hopefully be able to around £100k but we couldn’t pay it off as a lump sum because of it being an interest only mortgage, we can only overpay by 10% per year

BTW I don’t know exactly as we are waiting for property to be sold.

Even if we can add the existing years on surely he can then charge more? We’ll definitely discuss it with our solicitor

Then overpay by 10% a year! That reduces the repayments so you save the remainder and the next year use those savings to over pay by another 10%. Rinse and repeat. If your savings are more than the remaining 10% which they will be at some point, just keep saving till you have enough to pay in full.

How?!? Hypothetical figures but we’ll have £100K in the bank and can use that to overpay but that won’t clear the mortgage and we won’t be able to save as we’ll still be paying £500 a month as we’re on a fixed rate.

But if you pay off 10% of the balance the repayments have to go down even on a fixed interest rate...

Say you have £200,000 mortgage on a 5% a year interest rate. You pay £10,000 a year interest, so £833 per month.

Pay off 10% (£20,000) and your mortgage is now £180,000. 5% of that is £750 per month, saving you almost £100 pm.

Year 2 pay off another 10% (£18,000) so your mortgage is now £162,000; 5% of that is £675 a month, so you now save £160 pm.

etc etc

Sorry, as you can tell I don’t really understand mortgages! To be honest, I’d rather settle for the 99 year lease and be able to clear out mortgage, which may be doable. I won’t know for certain what we can do until the house has sold and I have received the money. The lease will be priority but fingers crossed there’ll be enough for the mortgage as well.

To be honest I’d rather be living in a flat with a short lease and no way of paying off the mortgage and have my Mum back

I just thought I'd update. Today we have started the ball rolling to extend the lease. There won't be quite enough in the inheritance to clear the mortgage but we should be able to to it.

Until the mortgage is paid off we can't put the property in joint names so we need to find the money as Santander won't allow it. DH won't get a mortgage because of his age and being self employed and I very much doubt I'll be able to so fingers crossed we're not too short!

Thank you to everyone for your advice.

There is a website called www.lease-advice.org

Got to be worth a shot.

You can book a call with them: its free! They can give you advice re negotiating the lease I think.

Good luck

Try and sell it if ou will ever want to move ... That lease is a shocker

I thought I’d update about the mortgage and lease. My inheritance came through a couple of weeks ago and we cleared the mortgage last week and received the notice today that the lender had discharged their interest and the property is now solely owned by DH.

We are expecting the lease to come through any day now and, once we are happy, that will be sorted out and increased to 99 years which is standard for these properties. The conveyancer is going to sort out transferring the house into both names at the same time.

Thank you to everyone who has given me advice on this thread