We’re lease extension specialists who will look after your lease extension from end-to-end on a fixed-fee basis, including the legal and valuation work.
Homehold are specialists in lease extensions and freehold purchase claims for flats – it is quite literally all we do!
Our end-to-end lease extension service will take your case from instruction through to completion for a fixed price of £2,325+VAT.
For more information on our specialist service please keep reading!
What is your lease extension service?
Usually when you complete a lease extension you will need to instruct different professionals to value the premium, serve notice, negotiate and complete conveyancing work
This means that everyone just does "their bit" - and you're left project managing the process.
At Homehold we bring this service into a one-stop-shop.
Preparation
The first part of any lease extension is to make sure that we have absolutely everything we need to complete the process – to avoid nasty surprises later down the line.
For example, we will purchase all the documents relating to your title, any headlease title and your freeholder’s title from the Land Registry and we check that these are all present and not missing something critical.
We will also make sure we know who your freeholder is and that we have an address 'given for service'.
Valuation
The next stage is the valuation, the purpose of which is to give you a concrete idea about how much you should pay for your lease extension but also to provide us with the evidence we need to negotiate the lease extension premium effectively.
Full detail on this report is available on our lease extension surveyors page and we summarise this into a detailed report which explains the figure that we’d like you to pay for your lease extension and the maximum we think the freeholder can reasonably ask for, based on the evidence available.
We show all the evidence of how we arrived at the figures and our calculations – and we’re always on hand to answer questions if you have them.
Serving Notice
When you’re ready to start your lease extension formally, we’ll prepare and serve a section 42 notice on your landlord. This is an official document which essentially says: “I claim my right to a new lease – and this is how much I want to pay for it”.
In this notice we’ll include a reasonable figure, but one which includes some room for negotiation.
By law the freeholder has two months to respond to this notice, but it is customary to give 75 days to allow some time for postage.
During this period, your freeholder may ask to inspect your flat and for you to pay a deposit of 10% of the premium sum proposed in your initial notice.
It is important you use a lease extension specialist to service this notice – as small errors can invalidate it.
Negotiation
It’s common that the freeholder will come back with a much higher figure in their counter-notice, and it is our job to negotiate with them to get a price that everyone can agree to.
We negotiate hard using the evidence we’ve collected in our lease extension valuation report.
If it is not possible to agree a premium, we can threaten your landlord with tribunal action. The reality is that tribunal applications and hearings are very uncommon: neither party wants to incur the expense. We’re available to provide expert witness reports at tribunal if required.
We’re quite unusual that we include our negotiation work within our fixed-fee – and if you are considering a competitor ask them if they do this. Some lease extension cases are easy to negotiate to negotiate and some are not. As a firm we’ve decided to take the rough with the smooth while giving you the certainty of a fixed-price.
Conveyancing
Once the premium has been agreed we will introduce you freeholder’s solicitor to the solicitor we have instructed on your behalf to complete the lease extension.
We’ll oversee them on your behalf to make sure that the case concludes in a timely manner.
Once the lease has been agreed, you’ll be sent a copy to sign and return and a completion statement which is the final bill. Once those are squared away, we'll push for completion and you can sit back and opening the bubbly.
Project Management
One of the major things that sets Homehold apart from our competitors is that we look after you and your case from the start of the lease extension process right until the end.
During the lease extension we’ll be pushing your case along and keeping you updated each week.
What makes Homehold a lease extension specialist?
At Homehold all we do is lease extension and collective enfranchisement under the Leasehold Reform Housing and Urban Development Act 1993.
We are a proud member of the Association of Leasehold Enfranchisement Practitioners (ALEP) which is an organisation set up to ensure specialists working in this industry adhere to an agreed level of service and conduct.
ALEP is the kite-mark of quality for service providers working in this sector. They promote best practice among members and their events and conferences provide opportunities to network with other experts in the leasehold sector.
Equally we frequently attend other industry events, such as the Leasehold Forum, to ensure our expert team is always at the forefront of any developments.
Why should I use a specialist like Homehold rather than my normal solicitor?
Leasehold Enfranchisement is notoriously complicated. This is essentially because it is a mass of rules and deadlines.
The sanctions for missing a deadline or getting something wrong are very unforgiving. Examples include your lease extension being withdrawn, paying a higher premium than you should or the landlord passing on higher legal costs.
As lease extension specialists, we are aware of the requirements of the statute and decisions in relevant case law. Our processes have been refined to ensure we avoid mistakes, and we have custom-CMS system to ensure we never miss a deadline.
How much does your lease extension service cost?
Our end-to-end lease extension service is the fixed price of £2,325+VAT.
This is payable in three instalments of £775+VAT. The first is payable on instruction, the second before we serve notice and the third once the premium has been agreed.
Here from one of our existing customers...
Extending the lease on our flat in West London should have been straightforward, but our freeholder refused to compromise on the price and tried to make changes to our lease.
That's when specialists like Homehold come into their own. Homehold applied to the property tribunal on our behalf and we achieved a good deal on the premium and reasonable freeholder’s fees as a result.
Using Homehold was far less expensive than using solicitors to handle the litigation and a separate valuer to make our case. Homehold also kept us informed at every stage, which was reassuring.
Anne Wilson