Nearly all residential leasehold flats will suffer a drop in value following a recent Court of Appeal ruling, says Glyn Crews
Until recently, leasehold reform has been the sole preserve of a handful of lawyers and surveyors—the Leasehold Advisory Service's list of self-certifying expert solicitors and surveyors does not take long to read. All that solicitors and surveyors acting for buyers and their mortgagees needed to know about the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 (LRHUDA 1993) was that leases with terms of less than 80 years unexpired had “marriage value”. Solicitors or surveyors coming across a lease with less than 80 years left to run would recommend that their client obtain advice from a leasehold reform specialist.
All that began to change following the Lands Tribunal's decisions on the “Sportelli appeals” in September 2006. Those decisions were upheld by the Court of Appeal in October 2007 ([2007] EWCA Civ 1042, [2007] All ER (D) 396 (Oct)). In doing so, the court has significantly adjusted the residential property market, probably by billions of pounds,
