Owning your own home

Brilliant, just as I'm thinking of selling my flat a Section 20 notice for £16K drops through the letterbox.

Unfortunate timing. Assume there's no sinking fund?

Two strategies -

1. Be up front about at after an offer is submitted. You'll probably pay some, if not most of it. Or you could try refusing to negotiate, depending on the quality of the offer vs. asking and how much interest you are getting. If there are three other buyers in the queue then you can be demanding, if you have one interested party then less so, obvs.

2. Wait until buyers' solicitors find out about it, feign ignorance, refuse to negotiate. Depending on how much the buyer wants the place, you might dodge some or all of it, but you'd be a bit of a cunt.

Once you have an offer accepted I would be quite clear with buyers. Keep in mind when you accept an offer that you may have to pay the amount and you are comfortable with that. I would avoid to hide it from buyers because if found during searches it may cause sale to fell through, not because of the amount - an agreement can always be found- but because of a lack of trust

We told our buyers of all the details of major works plans that we knew about once they'd made the offer and made the estate agents make sure they fully understood what this means before we would accept an offer

Brilliant, just as I'm thinking of selling my flat a Section 20 notice for £16K drops through the letterbox

:((

Sorry to hear that. You don't need to accept it. You have the right to comment on major works, and the freeholder has to have 'due regard' for your views. If you can gather people in your block to feedback as a group you could end up getting those costs halved. Check everything they're proposing to do against the lease - many leases do not allow for 'improvements' only 'maintenance' and you can often push back on a significant amount of stuff that way. You have options open to you to reduce the impact.