If you are a leaseholder of a flat in Wandsworth, you almost certainly have a legal right to extend your lease.
For those with property in the borough, we offer a fixed fee lease extension process which incorporates the legal work completed by our solicitors and the survey completed by our in-house team of valuers.
Using the Leasehold Reform Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 we will add an additional 90 years to the length of your lease and reduce your ground rent to a peppercorn – and negotiate a fair price for you to do so.
Wandsworth has a high-density of flats and we are continuously working on lease extensions in the borough. Our valuation team and lease extension solicitors have secured lease extensions from a variety of local freeholders including Wandsworth Council, the Max Barney Estate and smaller landlords too.
So, whether you own a flat in a block on the Winstanley Estate, or in a period conversion in Putney, we will be able to help you extend your lease.
Who can extend their lease?
Most flats in Wandsworth will be eligible for a lease extension, whether the freeholder is the London Borough of Wandsworth, a Housing Association or a private landlord.
The two common exceptions are those flat owners who have not owned their flat for two years, or if they own their flat as part of a shared ownership scheme where they pay rent to their landlord for the share they do not own.
How much will a lease extension cost?
The cost of a lease extension is dependent on three things
- The value of your flat
- The amount of ground rent you pay
- The length of your lease
Most (if not all) of Wandsworth Council’s leasehold stock is held on 125 years from the mid-1980s onwards and have low ground rents of £10 per year. This means that the leases are still long and the cost of extending them is relatively modest.
However, flats in blocks owned by private landlords in Wandsworth are more likely to have shorter leases or high ground rents.
The value of your flat will have an impact on the cost of the lease extension. At the time of writing the average flat value in Wandsworth was a little over £545,000. However, even with ex-Local Authority stock values can vary wildly based on the type of flat depending on where in the borough it is located. For example, we’ve completed lease extension valuations on everything from a £300,000 fifth-floor flat in a block in Tooting, to red-brick low-rise block in Battersea and a £800,000+ conversion of a period property in Earlsfield.
You can get an indication of the cost of the lease extension on our lease extension calculator, or you can book a consultation and we can discuss to get a better idea.
What’s the process?
We offer a fixed fee end-to-end process for extending your lease.
Stage 1: Preparation and Valuation
Our solicitors will review all the paperwork and documents relating to your flat and block – and usually these can be sourced from the Land Registry. As part of this process, they will check who your freeholder is.
Based on this initial review, the solicitors will then brief the valuation team. To estimate the price of your lease extension, the valuers will be finding and analysing flats like yours which have sold in recent history in Wandsworth to use as the basis their valuation. They will usually adjust the sale price of comparable properties to reflect how they are different to your own. The sale price of the comparable properties will also be adjusted to reflect fluctuations in house prices, which will be done based on changes in the UK House Price Index for Wandsworth.
Stage 2: Notice Serving and Negotiation
Our solicitors will start this stage of the lease extension process by drafting a notice to be served on your freeholder. This document is called a Section 42 Notice and essentially set out you are claiming your right to a statutory lease extension, and how much you want to pay for it. If your freeholder is the Council, they will serve this to the Wandsworth Town Hall.
The freeholder has two months to respond to our solicitors with the price they want you to pay for your lease extension.
It will then be the job of the valuation team to negotiate the premium that you want to pay for your flat. Our experience with Wandsworth Council is that they use their own in-house valuation team to do the negotiation, and we have found them reasonably agreeable to work with.
Stage 3: Conveyancing and Completion
Once the lease extension premium has been agreed, the final part of the process is to get the paperwork done.
Your freeholder’s solicitors will prepare the paperwork and send this to our solicitors to review. They will check that it extends your lease by 90 years, reduces the ground rent to £0 but doesn’t do much else.
The London Borough of Wandsworth use Ashfords Solicitors to do their lease extensions. We have found that they are easy enough to work with, albeit a little slow.
How much do Homehold charge?
We will manage the lease extension on your flat from start to finish, and our overall fixed fee is £2,325+VAT.
This will include all of the legal, valuation, negotiation and conveyancing work that you need for your lease extension.
This will be done in collaboration with Homehold’s own firm of solicitors, Leasehold Legal Services who are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Why choose Homehold for your lease extension?
Homehold have lots of experience in your borough and will be well positioned to support with yours.
“Our team enjoy doing lease extension valuations in Wandsworth because we know the borough well, but the type of property is so varied. We’ve done a good number in the post-war local authority flats in Wandsworth Town, but then we also recently completed a lease extension survey on a flat above a row of garages in Balham”
Rob Marchant MRICS, Chartered Surveyor and Head of Valuation at Homehold
“We continuously have ongoing lease extensions for flats in Wandsworth – many of these are with Wandsworth Council and we are used to reviewing their leases and working with their team of solicitors to ensure each lease extension is processed smoothly”
Leah Veasey, Solicitor and Legal Director at LLS
Hear it from another flat owner in Wandsworth
I recently used Homehold to manage my lease extension. For someone who has not been through the process before, they made the complex process very simple. Their communication and management of the process is excellent and they seem to genuinely have the client's best interests in mind.
Michael Oszmann, Earsfield
