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 […]
Anonymous freeholders are the reliable long-term custodians of blocks of flats, Select Committee is told
And sector offers up yet another ‘code of practice’, this time for freeholders (whoever they may be when hidden offshore) One of the greatest fictions of the leasehold sector is that freeholders – even anonymous offshore ones – are the only reliable long-term stewards of a block of flats. The leasehold owners would be incapable, […]
Communities Select Committee lifts the lid on the residential freehold racket
By Sebastian O’Kelly On Monday, MPs of the Communities Select Committee at last flushed out the developers and ground rent speculators who profit from turning ordinary families’ homes into long term investment assets. A murky sector that habitually hides behinds the courts, lawyers, lobbyists and trade bodies finally had to justify its practices and, indeed, […]
Taylor Wimpey recommended conveyancing solicitors go bust after one is jailed for stealing £280,000
It is reported in the Liverpool Echo that solicitor Liam McEleavey, of Gabriel Solicitors, has been jailed for three years three months for stealing £280,000. A solicitor in Gabriel Solicitors, a firm of Taylor Wimpey recommended solicitors – which, needless to say, failed to alert purchasers of predatory terms in the leases – has been […]
Did government cop-out on retirement ground rents stuff new thinking in the sector?
The new chief executive of McCarthy and Stone John Tonkiss is delighted the government has caved in over retirement housing ground rents, while announcing strategic changes that were prompted by the prospect of this reform. The company argued strongly in favour of ground rents because it was disadvantaged by having to provide communal areas at […]
Long Harbour lobby MP Kate Osamor bars leasehold activist from Twitter feed
Corbynite Labour MP Kate Osamor, who asked a series of parliamentary questions on behalf of residential freehold fund Long Harbour, has barred a prominent leasehold activist from her Twitter feed. Baz Jafar, a doubling ground rent leaseholder, found he was blocked from his Edmonton MP’s official Twitter feed yesterday after raising the issue of the […]
Ground rents to be allowed in retirement housing, says government
Retirement house builders are to be exempt from the government’s elastic proposals to reduce ground rents to £10. This is a triumph for the lobbying efforts of the retirement house builders. “Unlike most parts of the leasehold market, where leaseholders do not gain any tangible benefit from paying ground rent, it is clear that they […]
Has Brokenshire trashed Sajid Javid’s reforms of leasehold?
October 14 2018 UPDATE: On January 29 2019 Communities Secretary James Brokenshire held a round table with leaseholder groups, assuring them that zero ground rents were on the table. Sebastian O’Kelly, of LKP and www.BetterRetirementHousing.com, argued for retirement housing also to lose its exemption from any ground rent ban. This week we should have […]
