It should be easy to find its absolute owner, but sometimes it’s not. You may not know the details and may not know where to start looking. The lease document for your apartment may not be the best place to start. It will detail the original parts of the lease and tell you who the original owner is, but this could have changed.
If you have been receiving requests for land rent, these will have full details of the owner. The lawsuit must be in a standard format, so you should almost certainly have all the information you need in there. But surprisingly, owners often overlook submitting the lawsuit, since it is rarely for a large sum, or the owner is no longer actively involved in ownership of it.
If you don’t have any of the above, you can easily get a Title from the Land Registry online (not the same as the lease, but it must show the details of your outright owner). The Land Registry charges £4 at the time of writing (December 2010) for anyone to search for freehold title. You can also get the lease title to just your apartment or the freehold title must list all the apartments in the block to which the owner has title. Go to the Land Registry website and look for the Find a property section and you can go to the Title Registry section and download a copy of the freehold title.
Alternatively, the outright owner is not responding to your attempts to contact him. It is surprisingly common for tenants of residential properties to call, write or email their freehold owner and receive no response. A common time for this to be discovered is when buyers or sellers of flats need to provide proof of building insurance for their block. This is often arranged by the freehold owner (check the lease document to confirm whose obligation it is) and it is their obligation to prove to the lender that the block is adequately insured.
If you know the owner’s name and some other details, you may not have their contact details yet. This is where you may need to do a bit of detective work. There are a plethora of sources online including social networks, online directories, and great search tools that could locate its missing owner.
The first thing to keep in mind is that the law is on your side. The second thing is, if you’ve tried every possible way to contact the freehold, there’s usually a way the system allows you to get the result you want, whether it’s a lease extension, freehold acquisition, or right to manage (RTM). You will need a voting rights attorney and/or adjuster to help you here and you can find vetted local professionals on their website.
Possibly the freehold is owned by an individual and they may have died. Alternatively, they have moved and have not notified the Land Registry of their new address, as is their obligation. Another option is that you were not offered the “right of first refusal” when a freehold title was sold. This is illegal and for 18 months you have the right to revoke the sale or buy it yourself.
If your landlord tells you that they sold the freehold to someone else, even though the details of the original landlord are on the Title, then legally they are still the landlord. It is your legal obligation to ensure that the registry is up to date.
One of the reasons you may have difficulty contacting the outright owner is that the business may have ceased operations, filed for bankruptcy, gone into administration, or even been terminated by Companies House.
You may have discovered that the assets of the freehold company, if the freehold was held by a company, may have passed to the Crown. The Treasury Attorney will almost certainly be happy to sell the freehold to you and your neighbors at the open market value, in other words, the amount for which a freeholder will sell the freehold at auction. The final value would be up to you to negotiate.
If the company is in receivership or administration, notification can be made to the administrator or official receiver. If bankruptcy files, then there will be a trustee to give the necessary notice to or for you to contact.
If your best efforts return a blank space and you and your fellow tenants cannot find the outright owner, a situation known as “absentee landlord” or “absentee landlord,” then you may consider filing for a vesting order through a county court.
You must first obtain a legally acceptable valuation of the freehold. You must use an experienced and credible surveyor with a specialization in tenancy rights. You can run into problems with another type of appraiser, and you can find a good, vetted, and experienced local appraiser through the appraiser search on the Association of Leasing Rights Practitioners (ALEP) website.
When you have the vesting order, you can file an application with the Lease Valuation Tribunal (LVT) to establish the cost to you of purchasing the freehold. The process is prohibited under Section 26 of the Urban Lease Reform and Development Act for freehold acquisition or Section 50 for lease extensions. You should be able to buy the freehold much cheaper than if you could find its freehold, because the LVT will consider your ‘offer’ price. Since there is no counter offer, as long as your initial offer is reasonable, you can pay the agreed amount to the appropriate county court and begin the process of acquiring your freehold. The money then goes to the outright owner if he shows up.
You can ask a lawyer, adjuster or intermediary to do the detective work for you. Be careful using those with a background: their professional body is the Tenancy Rights Practitioners Association. There’s a lot of footwork involved and you’ll save a lot of money doing it yourself. However, there are many pitfalls to trading, so you will need patience and perseverance.