Lancaster House (Block Management)

Lancaster House (Block Management)

Issues with Block Management often involved highly complicated legal and technical matters concerning leases. Every part of the process must be followed to the letter and you have to be highly experienced in the Block Management industry to firstly spot the mistakes when they arise and also know exactly what to do to fix them.

The lease for this particular building has some additional requirements outside of the usual standardised lease covenants which was throwing off the solicitors involved in the issue. In addition, the original transfer from the former Management Company to the current Management Company wasn’t registered properly at Land Registry by the solicitor (who oversaw that transaction for our client (the Management Company), thus leaving a redundant restriction on the Title Register that required a ‘Landlord Consent to Assign’ to be supplied by a party that no longer holds the authority to grant Landlords Consent i.e. they no longer formed part of the legal structure for the Estate and Building.

Stay with us…. we’ll tell you how we fixed this potentially damaging problem….

Our Senior Block Manager and Director advised both sets of solicitors and the vendor to fully understand what was needed and why. She also addressed many extra queries that fell outside of the LPE1 (Leasehold Property Enquiries pro-forma) management pack queries and also put together a Landlords Consent document for them to register at Land Registry which addressed the hurdle faced by the redundant restriction – a document which, had their solicitor put it together, would have cost twice or three times as much as what we charged.

She spoke to the leaseholder and his solicitor countless times over the course of several months to help get the assignment of the lease process through to completion.

Here was the feedback we received from the satisfied client, who we not only helped resolved the issue, but also saved them money:

"I recently had to sell a flat in a block managed by Benjamin Stevens Block Management. It was a very difficult transaction for various reasons. I found that I could always rely on the Director/Senior Block Manager (Sally Drake) for her timely replies, consistent professionalism and knowledge. This was invaluable in making sure the sale went through. 

I just wanted to say thank you very much to you for all the time and effort you put into our flat sale. 

I found this all incredibly frustrating and difficult, and I very much think that without your expertise and effort it would certainly have been worse. 

Strangely, despite the fact that you and I got off to a very rocky start (my fault) during the first 5 minutes of our first conversation when I let some of my frustration out.... from that moment on I actually enjoyed our conversations...! It was the only part of this whole business where I finally thought I was talking to someone who knew what they were doing. So...a very big thank you from me."