How to Find Help to Solve Problems With Your Lease and Leasehold
We are back from our short summer break and keen to crack on with helping solve your property problems.
Today we will have a look at how new help is finally on the way for the thousands of people who have problems with leasehold flats.
If you own a flat and want to extend your lease or buy the freehold, your first point of call is probably to go and look it up on Google.
If you do, you will find lots of solicitors, surveyors and specialist enfranchisement companies that can handle part of the process (or in a few cases, the whole process) and will be anxious to help.
But how do you know if these firms have the necessary skills or track record?
Sadly, in the information vacuum that exists today, the business of enfranchising or extending a lease has quite few rogues.
For example, one company will tell you for £75 if the block is available for enfranchisement -something you can find out for free by doing a bit of research.
The fact is that it’s all too easy to mess up the actual work if you don’t know what you are doing or you employ an “expert” who is not fully up to speed with legislation.
Non-specialist solicitors can easily muck up a project causing long delays and adding huge extra costs for the owners. For example, the legal conditions have been amended several times recently. Take the residency test, for example. Whilst many solicitors will know that homeowners needed to have owned their flat for two years before exercising their right to extend the lease by 90 years, many don’t know that the owner now does not actually still need to be in residence (this followed a 2002 revision of the law which allowed buy-to-let investors to use this legislation to extend a lease.)
So it’s good news that a new body called ALEP (the Association of Leasehold Enfranchisement Practioners) has been set up to bring together a powerful group of solicitors, surveyors and intermediaries to impose some discipline on the industry. The hope is that their members will be scrupulously objective in helping homeowners to decide for themselves which is the best route to go down.
Another good point of call you should use is the government sponsored Leasehold Advisory Service. My own book, “Successful Property Letting – How to Make Money in Buy to Let” has a useful section on leasehold and I can also heartily recommend you read the Flat Owners Guide by Paul Walentowicz and published by Shelter – a superbly detailed guide to everything you could possibly want to know about managing agents, freeholders duties, extending leases, commonhold companies, the right to buy your share of freehold, exercising the right to manage and how to out inefficient or greedy freeholders.
If you have any queries about property investment and buy to let I can help. I’m David Lawrenson of Letting Focus - the author of “Successful Property Letting – How to Make Money in Buy to Let” the UK’s top selling buy to let book and which has also been Amazon.co.uk’s top selling property title for the last 6 months.
I’m a speaker, a contributor to newspapers and a host of property websites, write a property investment blog and am a media commentator on the residential property market.
You can find out more about my property investment insights and details of my networking, advice, telephone consultancy and property investment seminar programme and property consultancy programme at http://www.lettingfocus.com/
My blog is at http://www.lettingfocus.com/blog/blog.html
What’s unique about lettingfocus.com is that we are unbiased and independent, because unlike most people in the buy to let and property “advice” business we are not linked to a property company, developer, agent or bridging loan financier and do not receive commissions from any of these sources.If a property investment is lousy – We’ll tell you straight and we will tell you all about buy to let and property investment - the good and the bad.
Copyright: David Lawrenson 2007. This blog is updated about three times a week.
Read archived blogs by selecting a date from the list at the right. To read recent ones just page down.
Today we will have a look at how new help is finally on the way for the thousands of people who have problems with leasehold flats.
If you own a flat and want to extend your lease or buy the freehold, your first point of call is probably to go and look it up on Google.
If you do, you will find lots of solicitors, surveyors and specialist enfranchisement companies that can handle part of the process (or in a few cases, the whole process) and will be anxious to help.
But how do you know if these firms have the necessary skills or track record?
Sadly, in the information vacuum that exists today, the business of enfranchising or extending a lease has quite few rogues.
For example, one company will tell you for £75 if the block is available for enfranchisement -something you can find out for free by doing a bit of research.
The fact is that it’s all too easy to mess up the actual work if you don’t know what you are doing or you employ an “expert” who is not fully up to speed with legislation.
Non-specialist solicitors can easily muck up a project causing long delays and adding huge extra costs for the owners. For example, the legal conditions have been amended several times recently. Take the residency test, for example. Whilst many solicitors will know that homeowners needed to have owned their flat for two years before exercising their right to extend the lease by 90 years, many don’t know that the owner now does not actually still need to be in residence (this followed a 2002 revision of the law which allowed buy-to-let investors to use this legislation to extend a lease.)
So it’s good news that a new body called ALEP (the Association of Leasehold Enfranchisement Practioners) has been set up to bring together a powerful group of solicitors, surveyors and intermediaries to impose some discipline on the industry. The hope is that their members will be scrupulously objective in helping homeowners to decide for themselves which is the best route to go down.
Another good point of call you should use is the government sponsored Leasehold Advisory Service. My own book, “Successful Property Letting – How to Make Money in Buy to Let” has a useful section on leasehold and I can also heartily recommend you read the Flat Owners Guide by Paul Walentowicz and published by Shelter – a superbly detailed guide to everything you could possibly want to know about managing agents, freeholders duties, extending leases, commonhold companies, the right to buy your share of freehold, exercising the right to manage and how to out inefficient or greedy freeholders.
If you have any queries about property investment and buy to let I can help. I’m David Lawrenson of Letting Focus - the author of “Successful Property Letting – How to Make Money in Buy to Let” the UK’s top selling buy to let book and which has also been Amazon.co.uk’s top selling property title for the last 6 months.
I’m a speaker, a contributor to newspapers and a host of property websites, write a property investment blog and am a media commentator on the residential property market.
You can find out more about my property investment insights and details of my networking, advice, telephone consultancy and property investment seminar programme and property consultancy programme at http://www.lettingfocus.com/
My blog is at http://www.lettingfocus.com/blog/blog.html
What’s unique about lettingfocus.com is that we are unbiased and independent, because unlike most people in the buy to let and property “advice” business we are not linked to a property company, developer, agent or bridging loan financier and do not receive commissions from any of these sources.If a property investment is lousy – We’ll tell you straight and we will tell you all about buy to let and property investment - the good and the bad.
Copyright: David Lawrenson 2007. This blog is updated about three times a week.
Read archived blogs by selecting a date from the list at the right. To read recent ones just page down.
Labels: enfranchising, extending a lease, freehold, lease extension, Leasehold
This entry was posted by lettingfocus, on
Tuesday, August 07, 2007.
