Leasehold issues

[Jkla]

Hi I’m just wondering if anyone can offer any advice. We purchased a leasehold flat years ago. We then became northern rock mortgage prisoners so were effectively trapped with them as our mortgage lender as we had no equity in the property. our mortgage was then sold on to nram who kept us on the variable rate and do not offer any new deals. We recently tried to remortgage as we now have a tiny bit of equity in the property. Unfortunately we discovered the issue of there being a mere 52 years left on the leasehold which has now thrown a huge spanner in the works. When we purchased the flat it had 66 years on the lease but the solicitor never flagged that this would become a serious issue to us. As naive first time buyers we were completely unaware of this and back in 2006 shows like homes under the hammer (that clearly evidence the pitfalls of leases under 80years) weren’t really showing on tv and sharing this sort of info. I appreciate we had a duty to do our own research but my question is should the solicitor not have mentioned this issue to us if he was acting in our interests? It’s going to cost us over £11000 to extend the lease in order to remortgage the flat and we just can’t afford that.

Thanks in advance

Some good advice here. I extended the lease with an absentee freeholder. Lease Advice should be your 1st port of call for free, expert advice www.lease-advice.org/.

You have 6 years to bring a claim for professional negligence so you are out of time to bring any sort of claim against the solicitor.

I'd extend the leasehold before you try and do anything else. That is ultimately your only option regardless of whether you have any equity or not. You might want to try and release what equity you have to extend the leasehold if you can't find the money.

This is mainly your responsibility but I am very surprised your solicitor didn't pick this up - I'm actually surprised your mortgage company didn't but then 2006 was peak sub-prime lending time so they may not have checked.

If the freeholder is absent, you might want to think about buying the freehold. You need to speak to a conveyancing solicitor.

You've referred to 7 years and then a further 3 years from the date your discovered - are you in England or Wales? Where did you get those dates from because they aren't correct for the purposes of bringing a claim against the solicitor.

I'm a solicitor btw. I don't do professional negligence work but what I do often crosses with it and I am fully aware of the timeframes you have to work in.

This is from personal experience though - I don't think your solicitor is there to advise you on your purchase rather just to complete the process. They probably did highlight the 66 year lease thing but didn't warn you what that meant. I bought leasehold but during the process had it extended to 250 years (plus bought a share of the freehold so have control over extending with no costs). I would definitely look into buying the freehold with other leaseholders if you are in a fairly small block of flats.

You could still complain to the solicitor but ultimately, you wouldn't be able to pursue them through legal channels.