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Viewing / Buying a house


Don_Simon

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We are now uncertain whether we want to sell our house. Got a quote to get our loft converted on our 1930s semi. It is for a hip to gable and rear dormer. Apparently our loft height is only 2.15m so we will need to lower the ceilings below (hassle!). We’ve been given a cost estimate of £60k for everything. Not sure whether it is worth it or whether we should just continue to consider a 4 bed house and move?

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4 minutes ago, omariqy said:

We are now uncertain whether we want to sell our house. Got a quote to get our loft converted on our 1930s semi. It is for a hip to gable and rear dormer. Apparently our loft height is only 2.15m so we will need to lower the ceilings below (hassle!). We’ve been given a cost estimate of £60k for everything. Not sure whether it is worth it or whether we should just continue to consider a 4 bed house and move?

I personally wouldn’t smash an older house like that around in that way, especially for circa £60k (it’s bound to end up going over budget, i’ve watched enough episodes of grand designs). 

 

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I’ve only been in my house 3.5 years and generally very happy here but another house has come in the market just down the roads that ticks all the boxes.

It has all the design features i’d absolutely love. I’m hoping it gets snapped up quickly so I can forget about it.

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5 hours ago, Genie said:

I’ve only been in my house 3.5 years and generally very happy here but another house has come in the market just down the roads that ticks all the boxes.

It has all the design features i’d absolutely love. I’m hoping it gets snapped up quickly so I can forget about it.

Don't worry mate, if I win the Euromillions i'll sort it out for you. 

I'll buy it myself and you can come and have a look at it any time you want ;) 

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  • 1 month later...

Just mentioned in the job thread about moving house, and thought I'd pop in this one to thank you guys for the advice on the previous page and reassurance that solicitors/estate agents are just knobs, as getting in touch with the sellers did seem to unblock something, though what the hold up was is still unclear, and my move has now moved on to the searches phase and is starting to come along nicely now :)  Hopefully I can get a date before christmas, though I'm imagining Jan/Feb may be more realistic.

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  • 4 months later...

My daughter is interested in a house ( first time me buyer ) that is in probate and currently has a 99 year lease. She has been told today by relative of the person who died that the lease can be extended to 999 years at cost of 2k. Does anyone know much about lease hold as I have only ever bought free hold houses. Current lease is £10 a year. Can this cost suddenly go up significantly. 

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5 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

My daughter is interested in a house ( first time me buyer ) that is in probate and currently has a 99 year lease. She has been told today by relative of the person who died that the lease can be extended to 999 years at cost of 2k. Does anyone know much about lease hold as I have only ever bought free hold houses. Current lease is £10 a year. Can this cost suddenly go up significantly. 

The general view it to avoid leasehold houses. They're getting a lot of bad press recently and rightly so. Its usually newer houses on estates? There will be conditions like what things you can do or not to your property. You'll need permission to do anything to the property/garden as technically you can never own it - the freeholder/landlord will. You just have the right to live in it for a number of years (the remaining lease term). n terms of the £10, I assume that is the ground rent? Every one is different - you'd need to see a copy of the lease. 

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13 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

My daughter is interested in a house ( first time me buyer ) that is in probate and currently has a 99 year lease. She has been told today by relative of the person who died that the lease can be extended to 999 years at cost of 2k. 

Yeah, it shouldn't be much to extend it with a 99 year lease. I used to do a few valuations for leasehold extensions. I think it's around 92 years left that the cost to extend starts going up a bit more, so it's worth doing now if she can afford to and will be there a number of years before selling.

13 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

Does anyone know much about lease hold as I have only ever bought free hold houses. Current lease is £10 a year. Can this cost suddenly go up significantly. 

Depends on what the lease itself says. Some will be £10 in perpetuity. There was a bit of an uproar a few years ago as new homebuilders were selling leaseholds and making the ground rent increase by RPI. They got so unaffordable so quickly that the houses became impossible to sell and you couldn't get mortgages on them. There was talk of legislating against practices like these, but I can't remember whether anything was done.

Residential leases aren't generally particularly complex, so it should be relatively easy for you to make sense of any likely increases by reading it. If you're not being provided it by the other party, you may be able to get it by searching the Land Registry and paying a small fee.

Edited by Sam-AVFC
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28 minutes ago, Xela said:

The general view it to avoid leasehold houses. They're getting a lot of bad press recently and rightly so. Its usually newer houses on estates? There will be conditions like what things you can do or not to your property. You'll need permission to do anything to the property/garden as technically you can never own it - the freeholder/landlord will. You just have the right to live in it for a number of years (the remaining lease term). n terms of the £10, I assume that is the ground rent? Every one is different - you'd need to see a copy of the lease. 

The house I live in is leasehold, built 1895, I’m not allowed to keep livestock or chickens etc. indoors. The leaseholder fee is 10 pence a month, and stays that way for the next nearly 900 years. The thing is, I believe there was a law change maybe a decade or so ago that meant leasehold house owners have the right to buy out their lease. Not worth it in the case of the row of terraced houses I live on, but it’s worth considering for some folk. Or I may be misinformed.

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33 minutes ago, blandy said:

The house I live in is leasehold, built 1895, I’m not allowed to keep livestock or chickens etc. indoors. The leaseholder fee is 10 pence a month, and stays that way for the next nearly 900 years. The thing is, I believe there was a law change maybe a decade or so ago that meant leasehold house owners have the right to buy out their lease. Not worth it in the case of the row of terraced houses I live on, but it’s worth considering for some folk. Or I may be misinformed.

You need over half the leaseholders to trigger the purchase and create a 'commonhold' and for one like yours it sounds like it would be pointless, although would cost next to nothing to do.

For some of the new builds with horrible terms I wonder why the banks with existing mortgages don't back their leaseholders with cash to buy the freehold and change the terms rather than watch the loan value collapse.

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50 minutes ago, Sam-AVFC said:

You need over half the leaseholders to trigger the purchase and create a 'commonhold' and for one like yours it sounds like it would be pointless, although would cost next to nothing to do.

Yeah, that’s the conclusion I reached after reading an article about it. Even at a few hundred quid, it’d cost us more than paying £1.26 a year.

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2 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

My daughter is interested in a house ( first time me buyer ) that is in probate and currently has a 99 year lease. She has been told today by relative of the person who died that the lease can be extended to 999 years at cost of 2k. Does anyone know much about lease hold as I have only ever bought free hold houses. Current lease is £10 a year. Can this cost suddenly go up significantly. 

Maybe they could enquire how much it is to buy the lease when they buy the house (and maybe use it as a reason to get the house price down).

 

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1 hour ago, blandy said:

Yeah, that’s the conclusion I reached after reading an article about it. Even at a few hundred quid, it’d cost us more than paying £1.26 a year.

They're playing the long game. The original landlord's descendants would have house-trained chickens by now and once the trend takes off you face being left behind or having to fork out to buy it.

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