Today I met a landlord in the building. He seems like a Very Useful Person To Know. Problems in this building have lately been repaired very slowly and at great expense (this was clear even before I bought the flat). The management company is slow, uncooperative and plain incompetent.
My flat's lease is only 83 years long. This scares potential buyers, as lenders often refuse to lend on short leases. The usual scenario is that you pay to get a new 999-year lease (around £10k for me) which would make my flat worth at least 15k more. So that was the plan in a few years' time, before I sell.
But it turns out the other owners are banding together to buy the building's freehold. This allows us to control the maintenance and repairs. Owning a share of the freehold would make my new lease cheaper, too. So I told him I'm very interested in being a part of that.
This fellow-owner told me not to give the current freeholder any money. There's a £40 fee for late payment, but they just approved a £15,000 quote for sealing one hole and fitting three fire doors (!!!!). It's cheaper just to take the fine while we wait for the freehold to be in our hands, then get proper quotes ourselves. I was keeping roof-repair money ready to pay, but guess who knocked a big whack off her loan this morning? I can get access to it again within a few days, so, here's to a few months of paying less interest.
Brunch: croissant, cheese twist, and watermelon and mango slices (free). Dinner is going to be a pepperoni pizza which some lovely customer flung into the freezer instead of back in the fridge. Thanks a lot, that's no longer fit for sale. But it certainly doesn't scare me off 😁
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