If you own a leasehold flat, when was the last time you thought about the length of your lease? Many leaseholders don’t think twice about their lease until they come to sell the property – at which point, they may find that a short lease makes it harder to sell or achieve the price they want. The solution is to extend the lease sooner, rather than wait until you’re trying to sell.
Six reasons to be proactive and extend your lease now
- When the time comes to sell, if you’ve already extended the lease, you’ll be ready to put the property on the market straight away. No fuss, no waiting.
- A flat with a longer lease – the longer the better – is much easier to sell. Buyers don’t want the hassle of having to extend the lease themselves within a few years of buying the place. Most will simply look elsewhere and choose a property with an extended lease.
- The majority of high street mortgage lenders won’t lend on a property that has an unexpired lease of 75 years or less. So if you’re thinking of re-mortgaging or looking ahead to a future sale, a short lease may limit your options.
- Properties with leases of less than 80 years depreciate faster than longer-lease properties. Extending now is a smart way to protect your investment.
- If you’ve owned the leasehold for two years or more, and meet other qualifying criteria, you may be able to extend your lease for an additional 90 years, on top of the remaining lease term. So if your lease has 80 years left, and you extend for an additional 90 years, that’s a new lease of 170 years – making your property more valuable and easier to sell in the future.
- Finally, it’s far cheaper to extend a residential lease at 81 years or above. If you wait until the lease drops below that, it’ll cost you more. Is it worth putting it off and paying more in the long run?
When you work with a residential expert, extending your lease isn’t as complicated as you might think. At Perry Hill Chartered Surveyors, we’ve helped many homeowners across Guildford, Surrey and London successfully extend their leases – and have fine-tuned the process to be as quick, painless and affordable as possible. Talk to us today about extending your residential lease.
