Cory literally gets every single thing wrong here. Leaseholds and freeholds are nothing to do with aristocracy, everyone who owns a house in England (bar a few exceptions) owns it freehold. Freehold (essentially) means you own the ground. Everyone who owns a flat owns it leasehold, because several people stacked on top of each other can’t own the same ground. That freehold can be jointly owned by the leaseholders, or by someone else (as in the case that Cory complains of). Leaseholders have the right to buy the freehold, if working together, but lots of people don’t because of cost. If leaseholders think the actions of a freeholder are inappropriate, they can take them to a tribunal and challenge them.
Which brings us to this case. Some people bought properties that had a risk associated with them that they weren’t aware of, are now aware of, and are being asked to cover the cost. Why on earth should the state have to pay to get it fixed for them? It doesn’t matter whether Citiscape is a financial vehicle, or a group of tenants - it can only recover the cost of actually doing the work - which leaseholders have to pay. What other solution do you want - take money out of the NHS to pay to repairs on private flats?
They sort of are but only in a historic sense. It’s a way of making money out of property that you don’t want to/can’t actually sell (because it’s entailed for example). Since entailed properties are pretty much a thing of the past (I think there may still be a few knocking around), that is purely of historic interest.
As you say nowadays, it’s more about houses vs. flats.
There are other ways of owning flats - commonhold for example. That has never really taken off.
Not so. A large proportion of developers sell their new built properties on estates as leasehold. Leaseholders can buy the freehold after 2 years, by which point the freeholder has sold it on to a private company for a profit, leaving the homeowners with a big bill or years of ground rent at ever increasing rates
This is true - but it is a regrettable recent innovation, which only applies to a comparatively small number of properties. The government has said they are going to outlaw this btw…
Leasehold actually still happens in HI; much of the land is owned by yuuuge corporations that have been around since (and got cozy with) the old Hawaiian royalty. We looked at buying into a condo development that was very nice, and has something like a 75 year leasehold; we also looked at a house that was leasehold. In both cases, there was a monthly fee of about $100 for the leasehold in addition to the mortgage on the building. Once the leasehold was up, you had an option to buy the land, but that was extremely complex, especially in the case of the condo, and we decided to pass on leasehold properties. The main benefit was that the closer you got to the end of the leasehold, the cheaper the properties became; if you were only going to be in HI for a few years, it was almost cheaper than renting.
I think the implied proposal is that the owner (freeholder) of the building should pay for it. I can’t find a reference to anyone suggesting that people should be giving up kidney transplants for it.
The building is near where my parents live, and I’m pretty sure is less than 10 years old. My guess is that the building owner first tried to get it off the builders - and has now found out they can’t so are trying it off the flat owners.
It’s a sorry state all round - frankly the fact that the government building inspectors were not querying this cladding years ago is negligent, but I would rather the building companies paid.
Yep. I ‘owned’ a leasehold flat in England with 999 years on the lease. When I moved to Hawaii the real estate agent wanted to show us leasehold properties, and we said no way unless the lease was at least 800 years. (There aren’t any that long here.) I figured that after 800 years I’d be ready to move into retirement housing.
Leasehold is the property version of media licenses, where you don’t actually own the licensed software or e-book. A scam. At least with software the scammers don’t advertise by attaching huge photos of themselves.
