The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and News on the Block are working together with the aim to launch a series of leaseholder focused events.
Our aim for these events is to give you the opportunity to meet professionals – property managers, lawyers, surveyors – who have a track record of serving the interests of leaseholders, and discuss your leasehold problems with them.
Some of the issues that we intend to cover will include service charge disputes, preparing for the First Tier Tribunal, right to manage, s20 horrors, lease extensions and enfranchisement, and assorted leasehold gamesmanship and how to win.
Back in 2006 the Law Commission recommended the total removal of leasehold forfeiture, but the government and its officials have done nothing about it. Instead, they argue that it is a very minor issue. So minor, in fact, that last year when the then shadow communities secretary Emma Reynolds asked in a parliamentary question how […]
Tower Hamlets Homes is spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on lawyers to thwart private leaseholders from forming a recognised tenants’ association. This is the sort of manoeuvre adopted by some of London’s most secretive and well resourced landlords, not the housing branch of a local authority. The only serious power a recognised tenants’ […]
The Mail on Sunday personal finance section went over the issue of leaseholders exercising right to manage and buying the freehold yesterday. The article can be read here It referenced the LEASE survey that found that 57 per cent of leaseholders regretted buying their property. This is a figure quite unprecedented in other jurisdictions where […]
Ten out 15 flat owners at Willow Court in Carlisle are living in the wrong flats after a mix-up following their purchases years before. Local businessman Chris Mayer discovered the problem when he tried to sell his three-bedroom flat. To his surprise and distress he discovered from the Land Registry that the flat where he […]
LKP has not seen one of these before: a derelict house in Middlesborough bought at auction for £10,000 from an outfit called Pay U Today Limited. In fact, there is quite a bit of ‘pay you tomorrow’ as well: ground rents are £300 a year, and rise after five years, and there is a 15 […]
… Conveyancing Association calls for enforcement of reasonable fees, and it wants Land Registry to register ‘lease administrators’ who handle sales … It claims there is ‘an imbalance of bargaining power between the lease administrator and the leaseholder’ … 34 per cent of estate agents say leasehold sales are a ‘nightmare’ … LKP tells the Financial Times’ FTAdvisor publication that freeholders routinely stuff sales as a cash-raising tactic … Leasehold transactions across all UK regions have risen to 260,000 in 2015 up from 220,000 in 2011 (Source: Land Registry) … Today 57% of all transactions in Greater London and 40% in the North West are for leasehold properties Sales of flats are routinely seen as an opportunity to squeeze 'extortionate' amounts of cash out of leaseholders by freeholders, says the Conveyancing Association. Consumers are inadequately protected as lease administrators handling sales for freeholders are not required to be part of an ombudsman scheme or come under the jurisdiction of the First Tier Tribunal of the property chamber.
Today’s article in the Financial Times prompts this historical footnote. The FT quite rightly highlights the Court of Appeal action of chartered surveyor James Wyatt, of Parthenia Limited, who is challenging the mathematical calculation of values in lease extensions. If he wins the case, and he is deploying the beguiling tongue of Philip Rainey QC, he […]
Leasehold properties make up 43 per cent of all new-build registrations with the Land Registry for England and Wales, and 3,000 of those were for leasehold houses. That is one of the findings in the Financial Times’s three-page cover story in its FTMoney section, published this weekend. The article, written by personal finance veteran Lindsay […]
LKP welcomes privatisation of the Leasehold Advisory Service, but why wait until 2020? The Leasehold Advisory Service is to be privatised by 2020, by which point it should be self-financing through commercial revenue generation. LKP welcomes this development, albeit resignedly. The reasons why are given below in our detailed submission to DCLG in October 2014 to […]
@LKPleasehold @ARMAleasehold @FoPRA @LEASEonline – looking forward to working to improve standards for leaseholders & practice in the sector — Sally Keeble (@Sally_Keeble) July 29, 2016 Former New Labour minister Sally Keeble is to be the new ARMA regulator, after former housing minister Rt Hon Keith Hill, also a minister in the Blair governments, quits […]
Pensioners at two Stonewater housing association retirement sites are said to be seeking right to manage using Freemont Property Managers – the company founded by ex-Peverel politburo members. Some held senior positions in the company when Peverel’s subsidiary Cirrus was systematically cheating pensioners in a price fixing racket that was busted by the Office of […]
Jim Fitzpatrick, Labour MP for Polar and Limehouse, and a patron of LKP, yesterday urged his colleagues to join the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold. Already 35 MPs and Lords have expressed their support. Mr Fitzpatrick was speaking in the Commons adjournment debate before MPs head off for their summer holidays. He said: “There […]
LKP met Professor Nick Hopkins, the Law Commissioner concerned with property law, at Westminster yesterday. The meeting, held by Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick – the MP patrons of LKP – and trustees Martin Boyd and Sebastian O’Kelly – concerned issues surrounding leasehold law as part of the 13th law reform consultation which launched […]
The final paper presented last week at the LKP round table on commonhold came from Nigel Glen, the CEO of ARMA. Mr Glen confined himself to emphasising the need for leaseholders, or commonhold owners, who run their own blocks to be aware of the law and obligations of communal living. Mr Glen told the round […]
The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership held a roundtable meeting last week to address commonhold, the form of flat ownership that prevails in the rest of the world – and has failed to make any inroads into England and Wales. These are the only two countries in the world where flats are sold on long tenancies […]
