Extending your lease
Extending your lease
As a home owner*, if you’ve owned your property for more than two years you can pay to extend your lease by 90 years.
To do this, the value of the extended lease needs to be calculated first. This value is called the ‘premium’.
Both the freeholder (us) and the leaseholder (you) have separate valuations carried out. Once the premium is agreed, the leaseholder pays this amount to the freeholder (plus their legal and valuation fees) and the new lease is created.
For more information visit the independent Lease Advice website.
* Shared owners can only extend their lease once they have staircased to 100% ownership.
Before you begin, we suggest you ask your solicitor for a quote for their costs (ours are shown below).
Step 1. Request a valuation
Ask your solicitor to:
- Instruct a valuer to carry out a valuation to calculate the premium for extending the lease
- Serve us with an S42 notice for this premium
Step 2. Initial payment
Make an initial payment to us of £250. This is a non-refundable administration fee.
Step 3. We’ll request a separate valuation
We will instruct our solicitor and request a valuer to carry out our valuation.
Within 2 months, our solicitor will reply to the S42 notice with our premium.
If the valuations are different
If our premium is different to yours, both valuers will work to reach an agreement on the final premium.
Step 4 – Final payment
Once the premium is agreed, your solicitor will send you a completion statement. This will include the following for you to pay:
- The premium for the extended lease
- Your legal and valuation costs
- Our legal and valuation costs (see below)
Once these are paid, the solicitors will work together to produce the new lease for the extended period and put it into effect.
| Administration fee (you pay this at step 2 above) | £250 |
| Cost of valuation | £400 + VAT |
| Our solicitor’s costs | £750 + VAT |
| Total | £1,400 |