Collective enfranchisement - leasehold

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HansBlix

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Has anybody had experience of acquiring the freehold from an absentee landlord through this process? particularly, the legal costs. I wrote to a legal firm specialising in RTE (Right To Enfranchise Company) and got reply that it would cost £400+vat for them to (just) give an estimate ...
 
a colleague went through the process and had untold problems with another leaseholder in the building who refused to take part.

another friend bought a flat in an old fort and found that one of the original owners had acquired the managment company from the developers by claiming to speak for all the leaseholders. he is trying to make a living from extortionate management charges and the case has been dragging on for years.

moral - keep an eye on your neighbours!
 
We lived in a block of twenty terraced townhouses built on a single site where the owner died leaving no relatives or even a will. Rent was frozen at 15£ a year, so we ( the leaseholders) bought the freehold from the Solicitors for next to nothing and had it run as a management company which issued shares, which had to be sold back to the company if you sold the property. It worked great for us.
Dont think the charges by the solicitors were all that expensive.
 
The whole issue of enfranchisement is a complete muddle abd quite horrendous. The problem is that the other side's solicitor's see you as individual and try to get you to piss-off, if you have a solicitor acting for you - they do the same.

No win situation.

I read up on the subject, told my solicitor what to do, and eventually we got a solution, but with hindisght we might have done better.

Conclusion - local solicitors know zilch, experts marginally better, top notch London firms - much the same.

IMO British legal system - based on confrontation - sucks. You have to do your own legwork; search the web, read standard legal works on the subject and brazen it out. Going to litigation must be a LAST RESORT. Judges know as much / little as the rest.

It's a bummer - I've been there.



Nurse, Nurse
 
this case might be different (how often has that been said?) because the reversionary + marriage + term valuation (the lease is 979 yrs) is, I calculate, less than £1,000 for the whole building. So, the landlord is very unlikely to re-appear after an absence so far of 20 yrs.

In practice, it should be a case of serving the Initial Notice (all tenants wish to participate) then applying to the county court for a vesting order if the landlord remains silent .... it should be "doing it by numbers" which is why I find it so curious to be unable to get an estimate of legal costs without paying for that estimate.

The one issue where a solicitor might be helpful is advising whether the management cpy (and owner of the freehold) should be by a joint ownership of the freehold by the tenants (there are less than 4) or register an RTE cpy with the added complication of Articles of Association etc and registration at companies house. The law seems to like a company owning the freehold, rather than jointly by the tenants, but doesn't preclude joint ownership.

Sadly, the Lease Advisory Service who could provide such practical advice are so snowed under with the 2002 (Prescott again) act that they have had to withdraw their (free) service until they've caught up with their backlog ..
 
I've never heard of a legal firm charging to give an estimate. I'm not certain, but doubt that it is possible under Law Society rules - you can check by giving the Law Society a call (if I remember correctly, it's 020 7242 1222). If you heard right, and it's against Law Society rules, then they would come down on a ton of bricks on the firm involved. Certainly you should not use a firm that charges you to give an estimate, and no normal solicitors would do so. Can it be that you misheard and that the 400 pounds was the estimate itself, at least a rough one?

The other possibility is that the 400 pound fee is what they charge to review your case, and tell you whether you have the right to acquire the freehold. If so, it sounds hight to me.

Generally, conveyancing lawyers represent very good value for money - compare the legal fees on buying a house to the estate agents fees, and how much work the conveyancer does compared to the estate agent. The only problem can be sometimes that, because of the low fees, the conveyancer relies on doing a high volume of work to make a living. This can mean that, unless the lawyer is hyper efficient, sometimes they can be the cause of delays.

A straightforward compulsory acquisition of freehold shouldn't cost a fortune in legal fees - I would have thought the 400 pounds would be about right. But of course, if there are complications which will involve serious litigation, it could be more expensive.
 
you were partially right in your assessment but when that misunderstanding was corrected, the actual estimate was as follows:

a) With all leases identical, costs of serving initial notice and review £600 plus
b) Vesting order application £1,500 for one court appearance plus
c) conveyancing costs £1,500 plus
d) setup costs RTE £500

Grand total (with no complications) £4,100 (to be split between 3 tenants) ...

Solicitor is charging £150 per hour which is only slightly less than the top rate each solicitor received in the Jubilee line fraud case for preparing their barrister's brief ...
 
I would get another quote to cross-check if I were you. I seem to remember legal fees when buying a flat in London 4-odd years ago were abt 400 pounds. Of course, if your building is much more complicated (title to lots of different flats etc.), then that would explain the difference. If divided among tenants, it starts to look not so bad.

I don't know about the Jubilee line fraud case, but in the City, I would guess rates for solicitors should be around 300+ pounds an hour for a moderately seniorish lawyer, closer to 500 for a partner. I would not say 150 pounds is amazingly high - what is the hourly rate for a plumber? Also, the firm is under pressure (eg. from the Law Soc) to stick to the original estimate unless there is a good reason to depart from it (ie. things turn out more complicated than expected). So the hourly rate is not so critical, it's (probably) the estimate that's more important. If things go as expected (no unexpected complications), and they give a bill for more dosh (they're unlikely to try it though), threaten to speak to the Law Soc about it.

You can help stop things going over the estimate by making life easy for the lawyer - eg. try to make sure everyone's agreed about everything and delivers docs promptly, no one changes their mind about what they want half way through etc.
 
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