A report on the conveyancing of rip-off leasehold properties, often with doubling ground rents and a host of management fees, featured on the influential BBC R4 You and Yours programme today. You and Yours – Book tax, Leasehold confusion, Sales of Insects for food – BBC Sounds Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show […]
Gary Streeter MP: Hand over the freeholds at Saltram Meadows, Persimmon, or else lose Help To Buy …
Tory MP for South West Devon Gary Streeter has told Persimmon to hand over the freeholds at to buyers at its site Saltram Meadows, or else lose the Help To Buy payola … The threat is made on the Plymouth Live website this afternoon: Persimmon Homes told to return freeholds within 14 DAYS – or […]
Fairview New Homes cancels sale as buyer wanted own solicitor and mortgage broker, says Times
The Times reports the case of a Fairview New Homes buyer losing a sale because he wanted to use his own solicitor and mortgage broker. George Perkins, 21, was excited to be buying a two-bedroom apartment at the Altitude development in Hornsey, north London, with Fairview New Homes, but was then told to consider using […]
Countryside Properties plc tells leaseholders wanting their freeholds: We’ve signed the pledge (and we’ve flogged them on, anyway) …
… and now we are “working with” the CMA inquiry (or, rather, being investigated by it, as others might put it) Countryside Properties plc has responded to leaseholders who wrote in last week demanding the freeholds to their homes. Here is the PR-crafted response. But to save you the effort, it could be precis-ed like […]
LKP meets Competition and Markets Authority over leasehold house mis-selling
The Competition and Markets Authority was given LKP’s insight into the leasehold houses mis-selling scandal yesterday. The meeting was hosted by LKP patrons and APPG co-chairs MPs Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick and Justin Madders, the deputy APPG chair on leasehold reform. Mr Madders, a solicitor, has spoken out many times about the mis-selling […]
Scale of leasehold house scandal revealed in mass email dump to house builder bosses
The sheer breadth of the leasehold houses scandal was revealed in the National Leasehold Campaign email dump on plc house builder CEOs on Monday. Hundreds of leasehold house owners sent emails, copying in Communities Secretary Robert Genrick, Housing Minister Esther McVey, local MPs, LKP and LKP’s MP patrons Sir Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick. Sites […]
Mass email dump: leasehold home owners demand their freeholds after Persimmon caves into court action
More than 700 emails jammed the mailboxes of house builder chief executives this week as leasehold house owners demanded the freeholds to their homes. The protest came after Persimmon caved in to a trading standards action in Cardiff last month. Leasehold house buyers at the St Edeyrn’s Village development in Cardiff claimed Persimmon sales staff […]
Now it is Shanly Homes dumping its customers into unsellable homes
A ripe candidate for the mis-selling investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, perhaps? Shanly Homes – owned by patriarch Michael Shanly – is the latest house builder revealed to be dumping its customers in unsellable homes. Today’s article in the Daily Mail features a couple in Berkshire who bought a £300,000 flat with £500pa […]
Tory MP Eddie Hughes moves private member’s bill to cap existing ground rents at £250
By Harry Scoffin Eddie Hughes, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Walsall North, launched a crackdown on ground rents in the Commons today. Ground Rents (Leasehold Properties) includes one of the Communities Select Committee’s headline proposals: regulating existing leases to have ground rents set at 0.1 per cent of the present value of a property, up […]
Taylor Wimpey’s Pete Redfern tells FT ‘we got it wrong on ground rents’
By Harry Scoffin Pete Redfern, the chief executive of Taylor Wimpey, this week told the Financial Times that his company “got it wrong” on leaseholds. The newspaper reports that between 2007 and 2011, Taylor Wimpey sold properties with onerous leasehold terms, including ground rents that doubled every 10 years. The terms had the effect of […]
Better late than never for the CMA?
By Harry Scoffin Six months on from rejecting calls to investigate controversial leasehold contracts, the Competition and Markets Authority has had a change of heart, launching on Thursday an inquiry into leasehold mis-selling. LKP appealed to the CMA to make this decision back in 2017. The pro-consumer body is expected to look into whether certain […]
Freehold for Elan Homes leasehold house doubles in price to £15,900 four months after being sold to Landmark Investments
But … Landmark Investments claims it has saved leaseholders over £1m by telling them they do not need to engage their own legal advisers in dealing with freehold purchases It tells MP that its practices have made enfranchisement ‘cheaper’, ‘quicker’ and ‘easier’. LKP are ‘pathological liars’ over leasehold abuses, says Landmark’s Mark Hawthornthwaite It is […]
Beware ground rent addicts bearing gifts with their good conduct pledge
Pugnacious advocate for reform, leasehold valuer and LKP trustee, LOUIE BURNS explains why the good behaviour ‘pledge’ by freeholders worked up with government is full of perils … Leasehold valuerBeware of freeholders bearing gifts – The truth about the Government’s freeholder pledge Freeholders launch clandestine plot to outflank leasehold reform and make millions of homes […]
UK Finance mortgage lenders doled out cash on dodgy leases, but don’t know how many now can’t sell
By Sebastian O’Kelly UK Finance, told MPs that the leasehold sector “works fairly well”, while drawing a veil on the doling out of loans to dodgy, doubling ground rent properties. Matthew Jupp, of UK Finance, formerly the Council of Mortgage Lenders, was speaking to the Communities Select Committee on January 14. But he could not […]
Housebuilders sitting on 600,000 plots of land, while taxpayers pour in billions through Help To Buy
Housebuilders sitting on 600,000 plots of land, while taxpayers pour in billions through Help To Buy The Guardian reveals the extend of plc house builders landbanking in an article published on December 30 2018. Sadly omits Churchill Retirement and McCarthy and Stone – the latter having a particularly healthy land bank. It argued that – […]
Leasehold house owners thank Brokenshire after Persimmon sells freehold to leasehold house for less than £3,750
Here is an encouraging letter from the owners of a Persimmon leasehold house at Links Crescent, Seascale, in Cumbria. There is nothing remarkable in Persimmon selling a freehold for around £3,750, which is 25 x annual ground rent of £150. This is what our spoon-fed plc housebuilders – whose profits have been driven by taxpayer […]
