Owning your own home

Anyone have any horror stories about freeholders (deliberately) fucking up your apartment sale?
Feel free to share. Need to know what I might be getting myself into.

It's possible but why would they do that? Bigger freeholders can be slow and bad at providing the information required to make a sale but typically there isn't much in it for them to screw you around. Small freeholders, i.e. share of in a converted house might try to spite you if they feel you've dicked them around on money matters or in some other way.

Street neighbours are fully capable of cocking up your sale too, you can't really escape it. But if you don't want to run the increased freeholder / leasehold / share of risk do not buy a flat.

I've heard of a few but it was mainly the case that there were terms in the lease that they wouldn't give up and making that clear rather than sabotaging for the sake of it (for instance one wouldn't remove a term in the lease that didn't allow the leaseholder to rent the property out so the buy-to-let purchase fell through).

Anyone have any horror stories about freeholders (deliberately) fucking up your apartment sale?

Feel free to share. Need to know what I might be getting myself into.

Not by a freeholder, but an RTM company tried to screw up the sale of a flat by a client of mine by refusing to produce a leasehold information pack.

The RTM company was pissed off because they'd tried to gouge a swinging fee from my client - who was building a new flat on the roof of the existing building - as a result of some minor changes to the flat being built by my client, who had been granted a building lease of the airspace above the roof by the freeholder. My client managed to avoid that - and prevented the RTM company from generally making a nuisance of itself - by some fancy legal footwork (though I say it myself) which yours truly came up with. As a result, the RTM company was trying to get their own back. In the end we got most of the information we wanted, but it was a long, painful and (for the client) expensive process.

Most freeholders are sufficiently sensible and commercial that if you bung them a relatively modest amount of cash they'll play ball. But not always.

Moral of the story, as ever, is to buy a freehold house. Unhelpful but sound advice.