November figures on the Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation / Leasehold Knowledge Partnership websites show a surge in leaseholder readership, with more than 108,000 page views. The figures confirm widespread interest in leasehold and in measures to reform its many abuses.
Visitors to the sites amount to nearly 23,000 – a figure that rebuts advice from the (three) officials in the Department of Local Government and Communities who have repeatedly told ministers that they were unaware of widespread dissatisfaction among leaseholders. Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation has risen the most, up by more than 2,000 visitors from 10,463 in October to 12,611 in November.
November figures for Leasehold Knowledge (left) and Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation (right)
Ministers are at last taking note of this issue, which has undermined confidence in the leasehold housing market. Few big central London developments built in the last ten years have not rebelled against the managing agent appointed by the housebuilder. Some developers – Berkeley, Barratt, McCarthy and Stone – have realised the reputational risks of simply selling off freeholds or management contracts to the highest bidders.
The retirement leasehold market is virtually static and has proved to be a disastrous residential property investment. The consequence is a further brake on the housing market as older homeowners decline to sell their blameless freehold family houses – the value of which has stood up very well – and downsize.
(Website “hits” stand at 223,00, but these are unreliable as every time a “hit” is recorded by the calling up of a post it includes the post’s url and all the urls of any graphics and pictures. So a post with four pictures is counted as five hits etc.)
Related posts:
Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation / LKP leasehold websites top 70,000 page views a month
Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation / LKP visitors hit 29,000 in April
ARHM wants to know your views about its new code of practice
The ‘dribbling geriatrics’ BBC report and Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation’s busy November 2009
If Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation has figures and statistics for loss of value to properties in leasehold retirement built by MacCarthy and Stone and other builders due to excessive charges placed on leaseholders in the leases, it should write report and ask “Which Report” to print it in their monthly magazine.
If the Which Report can link the big builders such as Berkeley, Barratt, McCarthy and Stone to sure-loss investment due to use of “leasehold property title”, and Which can place an open recommendation to AVOID buying their property it’s going to impact on national brand and their sales.