Selling a BTL

[Remmy123]

I have a BTL a small flat I rented out when my husband and I moved. Anyway I want to sell up it's hasn't gone up in price in years. We pay a fair bit of tax and unless you have a property portfolio you cannot offset anything so we are out of pocket.

everyone says we should hang on to it but i don't think property is a good investment any more.

is anyone else selling up?

Daylight robbery!!
How can they get away with it?
I was on the residents committee for my building when our lease extension was arranged. Each flat owner paid around £120 for the solicitors fees, and that was it.

Lease extensions are around that much in fact what I am paying is reasonable - I wish it was abolished!!

oh and to throw spanner in works this process will take 3-6 months then around a year to register with land registry so I can't now sell for another couple of years! Didn't realise this until yesterday which spoke to a solicitor

only positive I can offset the lease extension amount so I won't have to pay much tax over next couple of years.

hoping some kind of property boom happens and I can at least come out with a profit!

I had 2 rental flats. I’m was so happy when the last tenants moved out! Much less hassle having the money in stocks.

you were very lucky then
The whole point of a lease extension is the freeholder is forgoing the date at which they get the property back and thus when they could sell it for lump sum.

Pricing a lease extension is therefore a well documented exercise although of course the final amount remains at the discretion of the freeholder. It appears that your freeholder forwent any money at all

all is explained here:
Lease extension valuation | Lease advice

@moon PS as you refer to a residents committee perhaps you all actually own a share of the freehold and therefore were not going to charge a premium to yourselves for extending your own lease

That is a fairly common scenario when people don't understand that you can simultaneously be both a leaseholder in a block and also the (partial) freeholder of the block

It wasn't luck, it's due with the way that things are set up with the flats in the building; each leaseholder also owns a share of the freehold therefore I am both the leaseholder and the freeholder.
I'm surprised that anyone, particularly a landlord (i.e a professional who should understand these things) would purchase a flat where they didn't own a share of the freehold!

We don't need a property boom, we need prices to come down so that what would-be homeowners can use their hard-earned money to purchase their own homes.
So that ordinary working people can escape the rentiers who want to bleed them dry and invest their money in their own futures instead.

Not everyone is in a position to buy, there's massive costs to buying and selling, so it limits geographical mobility (ie stuffs moving for work), students who only want a couple of years' let, etc.

Not to mention the big one, you have housing benefit support if you lose your job. If you buy, you're on your own for a very long time paying the mortgage, so it does rely on you being able to service a mortgage. I think the shift to selling off council housing was to limit benefit costs but no-one picks up on this.

Good landlords sort big and small repairs quickly too, which is better if you have limited cashflow. It's not all bad and the constant stereotyping of uncaring, profit-maximising landlords as all arseholes is one of the reasons I've sold up.

as I mentioned in my subsequent post
your confirmation therefore makes it all the more idiotic for you to state "daylight robbery" in answer to someone else having to pay for an extension when you already knew that having to pay is more typical than the share of freeholder

I wholly agree with not knowing what you are purchasing, particularly for a BTL where capital appreciation on sale has been the best return on the investment, not the rental yield itself.

I'd say the idiot here is the person who purchased a leasehold flat without realising that not having a share of the freehold meant that they could be robbed in daylight.
Especially if that person was a landlord.

We already had the property boom, it is just a case of how big the bust will be now, and how many people are badly affected.

Housing benefit is a big one, that is a safety net for landlords too, mortgaged owners could have a much harder time.

I don't see myself as an idiot.

I was well aware it was la leasehold when I got it.

on that basis it seems you have no idea how to appraise a financial investment.
Good
It is numpties like you that mean I make more profit.

The problem for more recent landlords though is they are probably in negative equity by now, there won"t be money for stocks?