Our leasehold team will always try to help with any questions you might have. You can contact them by telephone, e-mail or they are also happy to arrange to meet you in person at our offices or your home. We hold regular leasehold forums and have a drop in session before each meeting.
Free independent advice for leaseholders
The Leasehold Advisory Service provides free independent legal advice for both leaseholders and landlords. Their website has a lot of useful information and advice guides to assist with understand the complex legal processes surrounding owning a leasehold property. Telephone 020 7383 9800.
To make the best use of their service and your time, before you call them please:
- Write down a clear outline of your problem and any questions you have. (This can help the adviser help you more easily)
- make sure you have relevant documents to hand and have a pen and paper, as leasehold law can be complicated and you may want to make some notes.
They provide advice by email, telephone or letter.
Extending your lease
Most new leases have a life of 125 years.
Over time the life of your lease will reduce and there will come a point when you should consider extending it. This is because if you own a property with a relatively short lease it could affect your ability to get a mortgage, and the value of the property may fall. There is no fixed time at which you should apply to extend your lease, but it can be more expensive to extend leases with a life of less than 80 years.
Buying The Freehold
In certain situations leaseholders of flats may have the right to buy the freehold of the building as a group.
The group of leaseholders can then decide how to manage their building. This is known as collective enfranchisement as it cannot be done by one person alone.
Breach of your lease
If you break a condition of the lease you are then “in breach of your lease”.
For example, if you don’t keep up to date with your service charges payments you will be in breach of your lease.
We take this situation very seriously and can in some cases take legal action, possibly through the courts.
Ultimately where a leaseholder continues to be in breach we can ask the courts to make an order for forfeiture, which means your lease could be terminated and we would take possession of your home. Under these circumstances you would not be entitled to be compensated for the property.
We would only consider taking this action if all other options had failed or where we were left with little option due to the serious nature of the breach.
Cartrefi Conwy Leaseholder forum
Our Leaseholders’ Forum normally meets around twice a year to keep leaseholders up to date and share information.
A surgery is held prior to each meeting where you can book a one to one appointment or leaseholders can drop in to have a chat in private.
Last modified on June 19th, 2017 at 10:57 am