Why leaseholders extend their lease, roughly how the process works, and what a conveyancer actually does as part of it.
As a lease gets shorter, a property becomes harder to mortgage and more expensive to extend later, and its value can be affected — many leaseholders extend well before their lease runs particularly short, both to protect the property's value and to make it easier to sell or remortgage in future.
Leaseholders who qualify (generally having owned the property for at least two years) have a legal right to extend under statute — typically adding 90 years to a flat's remaining term and reducing the ground rent to a nominal amount. This route has a formal notice process with set timescales.
Negotiating directly with the freeholder outside the statutory process can sometimes be quicker, but the terms aren't fixed by law in the same way, so it's worth having a conveyancer or specialist adviser involved to make sure the terms are reasonable before you agree to anything.
Reviews the existing lease, serves or responds to the relevant statutory notices if you're using that route, deals with the premium (the cost of the extension, usually assessed by a valuer rather than the conveyancer), and registers the new, extended lease at HM Land Registry once it's agreed.
Lease extension work is specialised enough that not every firm handles it, and fees vary depending on whether the statutory or informal route is used — an itemised quote makes it clear what's included in the legal fee versus what's a separate disbursement, such as valuation costs or Land Registry fees.
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