Homehold offer an end-to-end service where we will extend your lease using the Leasehold Reform Housing and Urban Development Act 1993. Our service includes all the legal, valuation, negotiation and conveyancing work you need – the latter provided by our own in-house firm of solicitors, LLS.
At the end of the process, your lease will 90 years longer than it currently is and your ground rent, if you have one, will be reduced to nothing.
Lambeth is one of the London boroughs that our team find themselves working in consistently. Wherever you are in the borough from Oval to Clapham or Herne Hill to Stockwell, we can help. Many of the lease extensions we have completed have been with Lambeth Council itself. However, we have also worked with many of the other large freeholders in the borough, including Peabody Trust, and smaller ones too.
Who can extend their lease in Lambeth?
If you own a flat in Lambeth, you will almost certainly have a right to extend it – certainly you will have if your freeholder is Lambeth Council.
If you have a shared ownership flat – where your landlord is usually a Housing Association – you won’t have a legal right unless you have staircased to 100%. Equally, if you have been the registered owner of your flat for less than two years, you’ll have to wait a little longer before you can claim your right to extend your lease.
How much does a lease extension cost?
The price you pay for your lease extension (known as the “premium”) is dependent on three things:
- How much your flat is worth
- Your ground rent, and how much it goes up over time
- The length of the lease
Central London flats owned by private landlords may have high ground rents or have leases that have dropped below 80 years – at which point it gets much more expensive to extend. Any flats where Lambeth Council are the leaseholder are likely to still be above 80-years, because most (if not all) of them were let on 125 years from the mid-1980s onwards.
A big driver in the cost of your lease extension will be the value of your flat. According to Rightmove, the average price of a flat sold in Lambeth during the last year was £569,225 (at the time of writing!) but this can vary wildly. In Lambeth we’ve valued everything from a flat above commercial property on a Victorian Parade of shops on Knights Hill in West Norwood to an apartment in Ebenezer House, which is a high-rise block in Kennington.
What’s the process?
Homehold are very unusual that we will look after your lease extension from start to finish, including all the legal and valuation work. The legal work is carried out by own firm of solicitors, Leasehold Legal Services – which is full authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Stage 1: Preparation and Valuation
Our solicitors will review the documents related to your flat and lease, and the same for the building or development that it resides within. This is done to ensure that we have everything we need for your lease extension, and there are no surprises later on in the process.
The valuation team will be briefed by the solicitors, and they will do a valuation to estimate the price of your lease extension.
This will be done by finding and assessing “comparable properties” that are similar to your own. For example, if your flat is a two-bed flat in a purpose-built 2000s block in Brixton, our valuation team will be looking for similar properties which have sold to evidence our valuation. The valuation and comparable flats will be very different if you are in a period conversion in Streatham.
Stage 2: Notice Serving and Negotiation
The solicitors will make an offer to your freeholder by serving them a notice called a “Section 42”.
Your freeholder will have a couple of months to respond, and we expect them to take this time – their Counter Notice will include a counteroffer of what they want you to pay.
Our valuation team will then negotiate a fair premium with your freeholder’s valuer, using the evidence we have collected in the first stage of work.
Stage 3: Conveyancing and Completion.
We expect that a premium will be agreed, and when it is the legal work to extend your lease will start.
The paperwork is prepared by your freeholder’s solicitor, and it is usually a short document that extends your lease by 90 years, sets the ground rent at a peppercorn (which means nothing), but keeps it much the same.
Lambeth Council have their own inhouse legal team who will do the work for the lease extension, but if you have a private freeholder, they are likely to use a commercial law firm.
How much do Homehold charge?
We will manage the lease extension process from start to finish for your flat in Lambeth, and the overall fixed fee is £2,325+VAT.
This is charged in three equal instalments of £775+VAT.
Included within this is all the legal, valuation and negotiation work that is needed – additional fees such as Land Registry charges are included within that price.
The service is offered in close collaboration with Leasehold Legal Services (which is a law firm we own).
Why use Homehold for your lease extension?
We have a lot of experience in working in Lambeth and are confident in valuing property in the borough.
“Like all the London Boroughs, we constantly have ongoing lease extensions in Lambeth. We are used to working with Lambeth Council’s own in-house legal team and can usually agree the lease extension document and process the transaction quickly.”
Leah Veasey, Solicitor and Legal Director at LLS
Hear it from another flat owner in Lambeth
Homehold have been excellent. They helped extend a flat lease for me and I’m happy with the price achieved and the communication and effort they made throughout the process. Previously I’ve had problems extending a lease and didn’t want to have the worry again. Homehold got me a good deal, much better than I expected, researching and questioning the Freeholder’s original estimates.
Sue B
