Leaseholders to stage ground rent demo at Redrow’s Ledsham Garden Village

This Saturday leaseholders will stage a two-hour demonstration outside the sales suite of Redrow’s Ledsham Garden Village in Cheshire where the builder is flogging leasehold houses.

The proposed action is reported in the Chester Chronicle here 

The protest has been organised by the Facebook group the National Leasehold Campaign, whose 2,300 membership is mainly from the North West.

The demonstration will be attended by local Labour MP Justin Madders, and Sebastian O’Kelly, trustee of LKP, will also attend.

The demonstration is prompted by fury at plc housebuilders building leasehold houses with onerous ground rents throughout the North West.

Many are former customers of Taylor Wimpey, which built leasehold flats and houses with doubling ground rents between 2007 and 2011.

These predatory ground rent terms have trashed the resale values of these properties and made them unsellable, evidence suggests.

Taylor Wimpey is currently undertaking a “review” of the scandal, and will report in April (although this date has been shifted twice so far).

LKP estimates that around 45,000 leasehold houses have been registered over the past five years.

Every year between £300 and £500 million of freeholds are sold off by housebuilders.

Taylor Wimpey has undertaken not to build leasehold houses from January 1 at new sites (although it is still trying to sell out leasehold houses at existing estates).

Many freeholds have been sold to murky investment groups such as Adriatic Land and E&J Capital Partners that hide their ultimate beneficial ownership behind nominee directors. Vincent Tchenguiz is also a buyer, with his interests controlled by the so-called Tchenguiz Family Trust, based in the British Virgin Islands.

HomeGround, the ground rent management company controlled by Will Astor – David Cameron’s (half) brother-in-law – has admitted it manages freeholds that are owned offshore.

Redrow is no stranger to the leasehold game, but it shares that in common with every other housebuilder.

It has been happily building leasehold houses in the North West because it has got away with it, and everyone else does, too.

The Chester Chronicle quotes Redrow spokesman Matt Grayson saying: “We sell new houses on a leasehold basis in pockets of the country where it is commonplace.”

What this translates to is: consumers have not kicked off about it, until now.

The North West has a considerable legacy of leasehold houses from industrial times and this has lulled homebuyers into thinking that a leasehold house is not an extraordinary and dubious proposition.

Well, thanks to the extraordinary greed and stupidity of a previous generation of Taylor Wimpey management creating ground rents that cripple resale values that situation has changed.

The North West is now the epicentre of leasehold activism, where predominantly young women – wives and mothers trying to make a home – have now mobilised and said enough is enough.

Anyone with historical curiosity knows that when the women start to move – Winter Palace, the Bastille – things tend to change pretty fundamentally.