Legal Advice

Legal

The Landlord & Tenant Acts of 1985 and 1987, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1993 and, more recently, the Amendments to the Housing Act of 1996, have each added security of tenure to leaseholders.

Leaseholders can now acquire their freeholds, they can extend their leases, they can apply to the LVTs to either set aside or amend service charge demands and, if necessary, seek for the LVT to appoint a differing managing entity.

If the LVTs adjudication, on the reasonableness of any service charge demand, falls in favour of the landlord, that landlord has no remedy for charging interest on those reasonably requested outstanding demands, or any ability to recover costs for defending the call for the adjudication.

Whilst the lessees’ obligations to pay service charge demands are suspended from the inception of the adjudication process and the duration of that process to its findings, the landlords’ obligations, as covenanted in the lease, have to be performed at the landlords’ cost.

In the course of building up the leading brokerage for ground rent investors in the United Kingdom, we have frequently been asked to advise on:

GENERAL CONSULTANCY

We virtually have an “in house” firm of solicitors, through a long standing close working relationship, that work mainly with the ground rent based landlord-tenant relationship. From statutory obligations and protections through to debt recovery, to include covenanted obligations and protections by all parties. Their attention to detail and depth of knowledge through statutory case law to the judgements of the LVTs and lands tribunals, is worthy of note. If you have issues on which you would welcome an experienced considered opinion, but fear the likely costs of obtaining valuable information, then give us a call.