Owning your own home

I bet the EA is chuffed about all this.

No way the EA isn't complicit in this. Hard to see the benefit to them though as surely no-one will be stupid enough to buy once they find out the situation so they'll be wasting their time repeatedly.

i reckon they're as thick as thieves with the seller. as another poster has suggested - it's hard to see what either of them stand to gain out of their position. why risk losing a sale over a triviality? dickbags.

It's possible they did and the seller just 'changed their mind' and let you know via the lease.

But yeah.

that's what keeps pinging around our minds. to be fair, we only have information provided to us by our solicitors, so there's every chance they could have gotten the whole affair arse about face, in which case i've wasted everyone on here's time.

I'd be tempted then to drag things out a bit and waste some more of their time. If you really think they are in on it. It wouldn't cost you anything, maybe a few phone calls.

ha! that does set my cunt gland all a-quiver but frankly, i think we just want to move the fuck on.

Don't they owe you money?

Think of all the frozen sausages and hammers you can now buy.

thankfully no. and instead of trying to angle for any compo for the time they've wasted, i'd rather use my energy calling them a shower of arseholes who want feeding toes first into the nearest wood chipper.

Name and shame... all over the internet.

Leasehold on ex.LA is pretty common. Leasehold on a private sale can >>>>>>>

My parents (and a fair few others I've seen) have 60s leasehold houses (not ex-LA) but they are paying a peppercorn rent (it was either £2 or £20 a year when I last saw it) on a long lease with no scope for significant increases.

Current owner trying to keep the freehold is clearly dodgy as fuck though. I'd be tempted to go quiet for a while and let the estate agent waste a few weeks chasing you to see what is happening.

Vendor of the house we're buying want us to go halves on an indemnity because they didn't get listed building consent (but did get retrospective planning permission) for an extension they'd built. Jog on mate - we're already buying your house, you can stump up for the policy.

I guess leasehold is pricey as fuck in London?

The house I am currently selling is leasehold, seems to be a lot in certain areas of South Manchester. But the ground rent is £4 a year. Four. Quid. I looked into buying it out about five years ago - it was £500. But it's a 999 year lease. So it was pretty pointless.

If you really liked the house I'd definitely try to negotiate on the lease as part of the whole deal. With a take it or leave it "you've fucked us around" offer. But that depends on daft London prices I guess.

double post

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The indemnity policy we bought on the place we sold was £150, not even noticeable in the grand scheme of things, no idea why they want to go halves.

I think they're pissed off because we didn't want to buy their horrible (and massive) wardrobe and now they have to take a window out to move it so they're trying to cover costs.

Note to sellers

If you have something in your home that is a massive pain in the ass to dispose of before you leave offer it to the buyers for free

I don't think it's just a financial issue.

I'm in a leasehold flat where the freeholder is a known slum landlord. He does pointless major works every three or four years just to get himself a kickback, he tries his best to do 'informal' lease negotiations where he puts in onerous clauses, and he turns out shared car park into a public car park for which we pay the upkeep and he keeps the profits.

It's not the financial side of things that hurts me personally; our ground rent is £100 a year, it's nothing. It's the fact that I do not have control over my own home. Someone who does not live here can do these things to me. That's the kicker.

If I bought a house that was leasehold I would be even more infuriated about it because it's totally unnecessary.

Things are changing - with the leasehold consultation, homeowners will begin to get more powers of control. But it's a bitter pill to swallow when you're buying a half a million pound house I imagine.

Just checked the ad for the house we are buying and it too doesn't state if it's freehold or leasehold. Had a quick panic but a call to the EA confirmed it is indeed a freehold. Phew

I've seen another one where the freeholder states the new ground rent as a proportion of market value and the leaseholder has threee months to challenge it. What happens if the leaseholder goes travelling for four months and comes back to find the freeholder calculated it at £20k per annum and the leaseholder has missed the deadline to challenge it?

You can easily see stuff like this being a misselling case in the future. It's obvious that people just want somewhere to live with a known cost into the future, yet are being sold complex (index linked!) financial instruments tied to their houses.

Note to sellers

If you have something in your home that is a massive pain in the ass to dispose of before you leave offer it to the buyers for free

When we moved in to current flat we found the previous people had left the fridge freezer. It was one of those big American style ones (with water and ice dispenser) that probably required its doors to be removed to get in/out (of a first floor flat with a tricky exit down external stairs to boot). It wasn't listed on the items we negotiated about (blinds, curtains, lights, etc).

That was 10 years ago and its still going strong. An equivalent replacement would be >£1k according to JL.

Other bit of advice (as downstairs neighbour owns a removal company). If there's something left in the house that you want to dispose of, offer it to the removal company for free, they'll usually be happy to take stuff away and either scrap it or sell it on.

It's obvious that people just want somewhere to live with a known cost into the future, yet are being sold complex (index linked!) financial instruments tied to their houses.

As before, the real question is why solicitors aren't explaining the impact of the agreements these people are wandering in to.