Leasehold Property law. Personally delivered.
Leasehold Property law. Personally delivered.
A lease too short for the buyer's lender does not have to end the sale. Three routes, and why one has become much simpler since January 2025.
Reviewed 25 July 2026
It is one of the commonest reasons leaseholders come to us, and usually the most time-critical.
The cleanest answer where there is time. The claim runs alongside the sale and completes first, so the buyer takes a long lease and the lender has nothing to object to. It requires a co-operative timetable and a buyer willing to wait, which in practice means a chain that is not already under strain.
Where a section 42 notice has already been served, the benefit of it can pass to the buyer. But it is assignable only with the lease of the entire flat and never separately from it. If the lease is transferred without the benefit of the notice, the notice is deemed withdrawn as at the date of the assignment — which means the claim is lost and cannot be brought again for twelve months.
So the assignment must be contemporaneous with the transfer, whether in the transfer itself or in a document executed at the same time. Where it is not, it is the landlord who will take the point — and a landlord who spots it has every reason to. This is drafting where being nearly right is not enough.
Until January 2025 a buyer had to own a flat for two years before serving a notice, which is why claims were so often assigned. That requirement has been abolished: a buyer can now serve notice as soon as they are registered as proprietor.
The practical consequence is that a price adjustment plus a fresh claim after completion is frequently cleaner than an assignment, and buyers increasingly prefer it — not least because they inherit no unresolved premium, no timetable already running and no liability for the landlord's costs.
The statutory premium plus costs, established by a valuation, rather than a figure arrived at by negotiation between two people who do not know it. And watch the eighty-year threshold throughout: a lease that crosses it during a slow transaction becomes materially more expensive to extend, and whoever has not thought about that is the one who pays.
We handle the extension and the conveyancing together, which is the point at which the assignment either works or does not.
This article reflects our understanding of the position on 25 July 2026 and is general information rather than legal advice. The law in this area is changing: take advice on your own circumstances before relying on it.
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