© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
This interesting case involves a block of eleven purpose-built flats. Unhappy with their Landlord, a group of 5 Tenants investigated the possibility of enfranchising the block and acquiring the freehold. After hard work on the part of the Tenants, a majority was found having persuaded one initially reluctant lessee to participate, creating a majority.
The original enfranchisement proceeded and the freehold interest in the property passed to the new formed company with six participating Tenants and five non-participants.
Sometime later, new issues arose between the participants and non-participants and the previously group of non-participating Tenants persuaded the ‘floating voter’ to join them and this new group have now commenced the process to ‘re-enfranchise’ the freehold from the new formed Landlord company. Even at this early stage this raises a number of interesting issues
Participation
At present the law includes no obligation on the part of any group of Tenants seeking to enfranchise to invite every Tenant to join in. There are obviously advantages in doing so -the sharing of the costs not being the least of them.
Nevertheless if one particular group of Tenants wished to proceed without others for whatever reason they would be free to do so. Also, the law does not prevent the “re-enfranchisement” of a building previously enfranchised. Conceivably, this can continue to occur creating a ‘ping-pong’ effect as ownership of the freehold travels back and forth between competing groups of lessees.
Safety in Numbers
Where the numbers of participants and non-participants are finely balanced it seems that it might be wise to try and encourage participation beyond the bare minimum numbers.
Settling Old Scores
It is a popular myth that enfranchising a block of flats deals with Landlord and Tenant disputes once-and-for-all. There is as much scope for the continuance of disputes between Tenants after an enfranchisement as there was before. If anything the disputes can sometimes become more difficult as there is no longer an external faceless Landlord to deal with. The issues can become much more personal and difficult to resolve when they arise between neighbours.
Self-Containment
From experience, issues often arise between different parts of a building or between flats enjoying different levels of service (perhaps those not sharing the common parts, lifts or some other service for example). The decision in the Craftrule Limited v 41-60 Albert Palace Mansions (Freehold) Limited in 2010 illustrates that there is an ability to think imaginatively about which parts of a building to enfranchise if they are capable of self-containment.
[extra:quotes:boxoutcopy=1]
John Byers is a Chartered Building Surveyor and Director of LBB Chartered Surveyors.