Just got the invoice through from solicitors for purchase of new house. The amount was £288 more than we expected.

The discrepancy was the amount we are being charged by the leaseholder to change the name on the lease from the previous owners to us.. Unbelievable. £50 I could kind off stomach but nearly £300! I could insure my car for a year for that sort of money.

Is this normal?

The lease has 900+ years left on it so no point in buying out, we were told.. Well a few of these £300’s and we might have to re-evaluate that.

Robbing *******s

Not normal for houses to be leasehold, I imagine there will be a specific reason (private estate/development ?). Yes that fee seems very high especially as house conveyancing is so cheap these days

Our house has a peppercorn rent (£1.50 per annum for 999years)

When we purchased the old chap who managed the deeds did the name change for free. We did have to pay a small additional fee to our solicitor for some type of insurance to cover it being an old leasehold.

However he has passed away and the new freeholders haven’t asked for any rent in 4 years. I can’t imagine they are going to be bothered about assisting with a name change either which might cause us issues in moving.

They should really add in a compulsory purchase type option which does away with this bit of legal legacy.

Sounds like your solicitor has dropped the ball in not finding out this cost before completion, ask them to foot the bill

Yeah the whole estate (6-7 streets) are all leasehold from when they were built in the 1960’s, at which point they had 999years on leasehold.

I guess there’s not much we can do…

As if buying a house isn’t expensive enough without £300 getting slapped on for next to nowt.

If its any consolation we only had 87 years left on ours and for one reason or another had to buy it out at a cost of £5k to sell.

What Jambalaya says is probably true over the whole country but in certain parts it seems to be the opposite.

I was lucky enough to buy a freehold terraced property in Walkley, Sheffield at the end of last year. Many of the properties I looked at were leasehold that seems to be the norm in large parts of Sheffield.

A friend and his family moved to a house in Stannington, Sheffield that can’t be more than 10 years old and it is leasehold, they want to extend over their garage to make additional bedrooms and the lease company want either £300 or £500 (I can’t remember) before they agree to this. At their previous house 2 miles away in Walkley an “old bloke” came round to collect £7 or some other arbitrary figure once a year and all was easy.

Another friend that lives in the Crosspool has spent the last six months battling to buy the lease off the lease company and with legal fees is at about £2.5k which is roughly 1% of the value of his house.

Some lease companies are much worse than others from what I can gather.

Sounds like we are dealing with a company at the worse end of the scale..

The fee is outrageous for what I assume is a bit of admin from someone who probably doesn’t get paid the earth.. Sounds like these “fees” are totally unregulated – if your bank tried to charge you something like that there would be hell on. But for some reason it’s just accepted when it comes to leaseholders – once again, *******s

A company called Simarc by any chance?

If you haven’t already completed I would ask your solicitor what fee (if any) the lease stipulates. The problem is that the robbing bar stewards won’t accept your notice of assignment and that may lead to problems with paying ground rent or applying for consent for alterations etc.

I personally would refuse to pay it and let the ground rent build up, they can only come after you for 6 years worth of arrears and there are statutory provisions enabling you to clear arrears to remedy forfeiture proceedings. A lot of solicitors take the path of least resistance and just slap these ridiculous fees on the completion statement.

I don’t know the company name. I’m about to call the solicitors and find out what the craic is.

We are due to complete Friday and I’m hoping to get contractors in Monday/Tuesday next week, so as much as it pains me to admit it – I think we’re just going to have to pay it.

The solicitors did tell us about the fees for alterations, and that these would be in the region of 250-300 but they did not mention this change of name fee.

there was a program on last friday morning on the tv.

a retired woman who had lease hold on the land her house was built on , always paid a peppercorn rent……for the last how ever many years

the lease owner sold the land on to another company who then billed her 10000 a year for the prime seafront land as going market rate.

apparently she didnt have a leg to stand on.

Be very sure of what fees are due , when there due , who their due to and if they can be changed.

Yep it’s Simarc and the fee is for 2 x notices:
> Change of Ownership
> Notice of Mortgage

Absolutely unbelievable charging 2 lots of £144 quid for a couple of documents and letters. I knew about the alterations stuff but this is just bullshit. Nowt we can do though – I want to get into the house a crack on sorting out my garage and workshop!

I’m really amazed at how unregulated all of this is. Learn something new every day..