the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

np was just confused for a second - if the freeholder isn't responsible for repairs then they basically just get to charge ground rent with no drawbacks at all?

As I understand it that's what freehold means yes

that's a very risky investment.

I thought normally the freeholder was responsible for structural repairs to the building but am probably wrong, I don't know very much about owning property tbh. Fucking feudal bullshit system.

Hopefully it'll be torn down soon enough.

it's alright we've a load of very reform minded cross-party landlord MPs who are listening to your concerns and will vote accordingly.

yes i don't follow SV's point either: if they're owner-occupied aren't the owner-occupiers the freeholders? and hence they've been stuck with these bills because that what freeehold means? who is else is going to pay for them?

except i don't get this bit either, are surveyors excluded from ex-council purchases? (i mean obviously low-end surveyors might not have known to check re this particular aspect)

They own the lease, they don’t own the freehold. These are not rented flats.

The freeholder does sometimes need to contribute towards repairs and will be responsible for insurance to cover catastrophic damage, etc, but if your leasehold says you’re responsible for general repairs and you can’t show that there has been massive negligence on the part of the freeholder in conducting previous repairs, it’s basically part of the risk of owning part of a shared building, aiui.

The freeholder has the land/ building. A leaseholder buys the lease on the property for an extended period of time - hundred years or so usually? - but the freeholder retains certain rights including charges to the leaseholder iirc. It's insane, it's absolutely feudal

Yep. 5ere are worse abuses than this on a lot of new builds but it’s still completely ridiculous.

I think outside of London in domestic properties it's much less common nowadays. Seem to recall my dad telling me that after a few years of them buying the house I grew up in they were sold the freehold by the builders at an additional fee.

xps presumably the owner-occupiers are leaseholders and normally pay for building repairs through building insurance and/or fees to the management company, except this is a way larger sum than any normal management company charge, and the insurance is I guess not paying up because there hasn't actually been a fire yet

don't think the freeholder is responsible for any repairs in my building, or anything of actual benefit to the residents/leaseholders, but can still come in to the building and do whatever they like to it with no warning, or just have nothing to do with it except raking off ever increasing amounts of ground rent

(ours is one of this guy's companies: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/29/leasehold-tycoon-man-whose-firms-control-40000-uk-homes - we were told we'd have the chance to buy it out after n years but, surprise, that isn't actually stated in the contract and no chance now that guy's bought them all off the original developers)

Xp

Yep, it’s relatively rare on houses now though a lot of big estate builds (Barrett, etc), seem to have been put up specifically to extort buyers over the long term on service charges,

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/29/leasehold-tycoon-man-whose-firms-control-40000-uk-homes

brb gonna draft a new section on the next Labour manifesto.

This is the sort of thing, unlike, say, Big Ben's chimes ringing a lot less for a few years, that the Prime Minister, whoever they may be, needs to immediately condemn and make a priority to prevent.

*waits*

I'm sure the real problem with the housing market is local authorities not being allowed to make enough dodgy PFI deals

at times like this I need to check my council house privilege.

ok yeah, i'm unmuddled now, sorry for the derail

and totally cosining any heads-on-poles action

Fire wardens are patrolling constantly at a cost of £4,000 a week, which the company is also planning to pass on to leaseholders.

oh you motherfuckers

the fact that there's not even any gesture of goodwill from the freeholder, no meeting halfway, no initiative taken whatsoever just staunch refusal to acknowledge any responsibility.. how do you even look yourself in the eye never mind i know they're landlords but still

It's not like people like this Tuttiet guy accidentally gather a lot of freeholds while they're trying to provide people with an important service. It's knowing, legal extortion.

I mean if Javid is calling you the unacceptable face of capitalism

obviously the gulf between legality and justice is what we've been talking about here, but i really think that "i'm sorry that's just what the law says" is going to be a tough line for the govt to walk here -- homeowners are core mail readers, soon-and-inevitably-to-be-homeowners are the secret tory strategy to sirensong youth back one their side, where's the upside in letting this stand?

(obviously there's an upside for all the MPs who are also landllords)

If they’re landlords then they’d be responsible for the repairs. I don’t know how many are major landowners / freeholders but I suspect it’s more common in the Lords than the Commons.

aiui (which is not enormously) owning freeholds isn’t massively profitable in itself. Service charges can be high but they’re only meant to cover the cost of upkeep and repairs. You make your money through ground rent (which is usually quite low) and selling extensions to leases. It’s not a huge revenue generating thing but it is (or has been) a very safe way for the wealthy to park millions of Pounds. idk if the government really wants to rock that boat.

The bigger issue is that if you stick to the principle that the freeholder is responsible for repairs, you will probably end up with councils and housing authorities, who have retained freeholds but sold leases, having to pay huge amounts of money on behalf of people who have turned massive profits on ex-LA properties.

what i was getting at -- while obviously missing that significant upside for them -- is that i don't see how this plays well at all with the normal homeowners -- it dramatises their worst anxieties (that the promised security of this status is become a terrible trap (serve em right says calzino), so maybe what i should have said is the govt just can't win here

which isn't necessarily very comforting in itself: i know i have to watch my the-hidden-conflict-is-the-SILVER-LINING tendencies

I honestly wouldn't be so unnecessarily harsh, Mark. I have said before that when London joins Doggerland under the North Sea... etc. But I genuinely feel sorry for people with the problems discussed above, hence the comment "checking my council house privilege" where I'm currently insulated from this kind of worrying skullfuckery.

haha sorry, i read that as sarcastic -- apologies for monstering you :)

Tchenguiz is most certainly a landlord - though not of that building. It was the mentality i was getting at

In many ways us who still live in old fashioned council owned social housing are almost becoming the new lower middle class. we get free plumbers that don't come armed with contact-less account emptying devices. Low rents of course, and when a Freeholder rides past on his horse you don't have to drop to knees and doff your cap. Usually the opposite.

God what a fucking shit post. I just re-read it in a Fraser Nelson voice. but I still feel there is som trut ther

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/flat-owners-told-pay-up-14075008

^another instance in manchester. completely puts you off thinking about buying a flat or any leasehold property, which given the housing crisis, is insane

there must be other countries that have less broken systems, surely?

I think in Germany they have a system where owners of flats in shared buildings have a kind of management council that fulfills the same responsibilities as a freeholder often does. That's also, generally, how it works in the UK when properties come with a share of the freehold.

In either situation, the owners still have to pay. The only major difference afaik is they have direct responsibility for organising repairs, rather than it being down to the freeholder. The freeholder is meant to consult with leaseholders on major repairs but the money will almost always come from the residents / individual landlords. It's part of the risk of owning property - going along with the reward of equity in an asset you expect to go up in price.

Scotland.

I don't actually know how the system works in Scotland, I just know it's different and there seem to be less people getting fucked over.

This may just be the terms of my flat but I always thought you owned the inside of the flat for the term of the lease and anything exterior was the responsiblity of the freeholder, which is usually covered with service charges etc. Forcing people to live in a deathtrap until they pay up £30k+ in one go, especially if the owners were responsible for the cladding in the first places, goes beyond issues of mere legality (and the leaseholders seem to have a legal case here anyway).

The con of selling a (usually private sector) flat or newbuild house on leasehold and then hitting homebuyers with rapidly escalating ground rents (leaving their homes effectively unsellable) is another issue that's getting a lot of traction right now.

In general leasehold abuses are one of those things that angers virtually everyone wherever they are on the political spectrum and addressing them should be an easy win for an even remotely competent government.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jul/26/ground-rents-aristocrats-shell-firms-among-those-making-millions

No surprise that some of our ex-pm's family are amongst the shadow clique of freeholders.

I wonder how much freehold the royal family has a stake in

ooh look

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/11/duchy-of-cornwall-residents-fight-freehold-ban-prince-charles

and this is before we consider the Crown Estate itself

iirc one of the main policy movements in this area has been to make it much easier to force freeholders to sell the freehold to organised groups of leaseholders, but that has been around in one form or another since the 90s. It’s not necessarily a panacea though, the famous Art Deco block Marine Court in St Leonard’s was taken over by an LLC made up of residents - and they’re still paying thousands of Pounds a year in running repairs.

Forcing developers to take permanent responsibility for shonky work they have done would be good, though.

This may just be the terms of my flat but I always thought you owned the inside of the flat for the term of the lease and anything exterior was the responsiblity of the freeholder, which is usually covered with service charges etc.

I don't think this is normal, at least in ex-LA buildings - e.g. we had to pay a few thousand £s when the lifts got replaced in our building. At least in London, as said above I think there is an expectation in ex-LA flats that you will sometimes get random 4 or 5 figure bills.

yeah I suppose I'm surprised that even with recently built properties developers aren't liable for dangerous materials or builds. the whole idea of land as investment is repulsive to me but anyway

otm

I'm proper ilx level socialist on that last point surprisingly enough

like most finite resources it's difficult to justify any system that tends towards creating gulfs of inequity

More about "basic human requirement" than that tbh

that's kind of what I meant, you can't allow some people to accrue vast pools of land without denying it altogether to a lot of people, either now or in the future

same reason that some people might baulk at privatizing access to air or water

https://www.thegreenhead.com/imgs/canned-air-9.jpg

What's that from? "Silent Movie"?

oh tom, tom, tom