It has been described as “the PPI of the housebuilding industry” and has emerged as one of the biggest industrial-scale rip-offs of recent years. Countless homeowners have discovered, due to a combination of greedy developers, sloppy lawyers and government inertia, that they are not in fact, homeowners at all. They are leaseholders and under the terms of the lease, they are charged an annual ground rent, which in some cases, doubles every five or ten years, which can render the property unsellable.
The ground rent, it should be pointed out, is separate from and often in addition to a service or maintenance charge, as the person living in the house gets absolutely nothing in return for their annual payments. These charges have been completely exposed as being nothing more than a cash cow for the freeholders.
Content from our partners
