Living with Leasehold

Hello and welcome to Living with Leasehold.

My name is Sharon and I live in a block of flats in East London and three and a half years ago I wanted to redecorate my kitchen.

That was it. That was how a nightmare journey through the leasehold system started.

My partner purchased the flat in 1989 and it turned out there was an absent landlord and a negligent managing agent with none of the ramifications of this being advised at the outset.

Additionally, all through the purchasing process neither the estate agent or the solicitor were aware of the fact that many of the leaseholders had gotten really sick of paying service charges for work that either wasn’t done or was totally unprofessional and so they had done something that was not widely advocated - they witheld their service charges.

So, on purchasing the flat, the only inkling he had that there might be trouble ahead was when he got a bill for £400 that the previous leaseholder hadn’t paid but as the transaction hadn’t been fully finalised, he was able to ensure he wasn’t held liable for a debt that wasn’t his.

Leasehold is very extensive and very complicated and over a great many years successive Governments have recognised that the balance of power between the landlord and the owner/occupier (long leaseholder) has always been  skewed in favour of the landlord.

Subsequently between them they have been trying to redress the balance for well over 50 years, introducing reams of legislative measures in the process.

BUT…..and this is a BIG but…..NONE of them have put anything in place that would act as a deterrent, let alone prevent the abuse from happening in the first instance!

Consequently the long leaseholder CHALLENGES the predatory, the negligent and the plain useless landlord/agent but must have time (lots of it), knowledge (lots of it) and money (often lots of it) in order to do so.

I therefore decided to create a site to try and provide help for all those leaseholders who wish to better understand the leasehold system and what it is like to live within it.

Now, I’m not a solicitor, or a property developer but I have had to research the entire leasehold system for well over three years in order to turn around 20 years of neglect caused by an absent landlord and a negligent managing agent.

From absent landlords, Right to Manage (RTM),  the role of residential property managers, managing agents and the workings of commonhold (whatever happened to it?), to council responsibilities, such as Hazardous Health and Safety Assessments - I’ve covered the lot.

I am also a columnist for a leasehold publication and have finally managed to secure an extremely professional, competent managing agent who took us through the RTM process whilst far from perfect has allowed change to start to happen.

So, whilst this site is a work in progress, please feel free to contact me and I will do my level best to help you get the enjoyment out of your home that you are entitled to and should have been assured of from the start.