What owning a leasehold property actually means compared to freehold, and why it affects your conveyancing.
Owning a freehold property means you own the building and the land it stands on outright, for an unlimited time. Most houses are sold freehold. There's no landlord, no ground rent, and generally no service charge — though you're still responsible for your own maintenance and any shared costs if the property is part of a wider estate with a management company.
Owning a leasehold property means you own the right to live there for a fixed number of years, set out in the lease — the land, and often the building itself, is owned by a separate freeholder (sometimes called a landlord). Most flats are sold leasehold. You'll typically pay a service charge towards maintaining shared areas, and possibly ground rent to the freeholder.
As a lease gets shorter, the property can become harder to mortgage and sell, and more expensive to extend later. Many mortgage lenders are cautious about leases under 70–80 years remaining. Your conveyancer will check the remaining term as part of buying a leasehold property, and flag it if it looks short.
Beyond the usual searches, a leasehold purchase involves reviewing the lease terms themselves, checking service charge and ground rent history, and raising management-company-specific enquiries — which is generally why leasehold conveyancing takes a bit longer, and sometimes costs a bit more, than an equivalent freehold purchase.
Because a leasehold purchase involves extra checks — reviewing the lease terms, verifying service charge and ground rent history, and liaising with the management company — many firms charge a separate leasehold supplement on top of their base legal fee, rather than pricing every transaction identically regardless of tenure. On a proper itemised quote, that supplement is shown as its own line item rather than folded into the headline figure, so you can see exactly what the extra leasehold work is costing you before you instruct a firm.
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