Episode 3: Commonhold: The Resident Perspective

Mairead: Hi and welcome to Built Managed Lived. Today we’re going to be talking about commonhold and specifically commonhold from a resident perspective. So 1st guest is Peter Scott. He is one of five directors of IBCO Management Company Limited, which owns the freehold of 90 flats in Kensington. So Peter’s going to be giving us a resident perspective on managing a building. I’m also joined by Shabnam Ali Khan, who is a partner at Russell Cook Solicitors. She advises on lease extensions, collective enfranchisements, right to 1st refusal and a wide range of landlord and tenant issues. So, Shabnam, Peter, welcome.

Shabnam: Thanks.

Peter: Thanks.

Shabnam: Thanks for having us.

Mairead: So I’m going to start off with you Shabnam if that’s ok. For listeners who aren’t immersed in this world, what do we mean by share of freehold?

Shabnam: OK. So that’s a good question and it’s something that a lot of people don’t really understand. With share of freehold, the typical setup is if you’re in a block or a building that contains flats and the leaseholders have a share in a company that owns the freehold of the building. If you’ve only got maybe two or three flats, they may decide to own it jointly. But usually we’re dealing with company scenarios and it might be that they all have a share or some of them have a share. But I think one of the important things to recognise, and a lot of people don’t realise, is that if I have a share in a freehold, I’m not a freeholder. I’m a member of a company that owns the freehold and we still have our leases. So we still have this diminishing asset which a lot of people don’t always realise until the leases are quite short and they need to extend them.

Mairead: Sure, and why is that close to what commonhold offers?

Shabnam: I think it’s close to an extent and obviously we’ll explore that there are a number of differences. I think the main reason is because it’s a setup for leaseholders to have a clear involvement and input and power into how the building is run, should they choose to accept that power, obviously, and depending on the levels of engagement. And I think commonhold is sort of envisaging a very similar scenario. But I think one of the key differences obviously with commonhold is that you’ll no longer have your leases. So it’ll be cleaner in that respect. But I think that’s probably the only thing we’ve got to compare it to in England and Wales as it is.

Mairead: There are less than 20 commonhold developments in England and Wales at the moment because whilst we talk about commonhold as a new tenure, it’s not a new tenure, it’s been around since 2002.

Shabnam: Exactly. So I started my journey into residential leasehold around 2000 and one when I started working for the Leasehold Advisory Service and we were on the cusp of this really exciting legislation, commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act, the previous one, obviously we’re going through it again. And there was a lot of excitement about this form of ownership commonhold. And here we are, you know, over 20 years and fewer than 20 commonholds. It hasn’t taken off quite the way they expected it to. And it’ll be interesting to explore why that is.

Mairead: Sure, Peter, from your side, does Shaban’s description reflect how your building operates in practice?

Peter: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So we have a share freehold model, which means that each management company owns the freehold of the building and every owner not resident because resident might be rented flat. So every owner owns one share in the freehold company. We don’t distinguish everybody. It’s 1 flat one share. And even if they’re a joint owners of a flat one share and what that means, it’s kind of a circular arrangement. We do have leases, So every owner has a lease from the freehold company, but that owner also has a say in how the freehold company works and runs. We in Ivona Court have 990. It’s probably 997 now because we did 999 about 3 years ago. I’m sure that is strictly speaking a depreciating asset. It’s going to say most of us out my limited understanding of commonhold and knowing how our model works, it is I think very close to it’s not literally commonhold because we sell off a lease, but it’s very close to common hold.

Mairead: Peter, what does resident control look like in real life?

Peter: Well. Let me take a step back. I think this bug wave is a slight detail. You might be a resident because you’re letting a flat. Now that is a private arrangement between an owner and a tenant, but residents don’t participate in the management structure at all because they don’t have an ownership in the freehold company. If they have an issue, their remedy is through their owner, their landlord. So I think it’s probably quite important to point that out.

Shabnam: So that would be the leaseholder of the flat.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. So the owner has a lease from the freehold company and the tenant has a rental agreement from the owner of the flat. So we do allow subletting, obviously. I think it’s about, I think it’s about a third of the flats are sublets at any particular point.It works perfectly well. People come and go but I think it’s important to stress that it’s owner managed, not resident managed. It’s a slightly different thing. What does owner control look like in real life? Well it starts with the appointment of the directors and that is done via general meeting every two years where directors are elected and so any one of the 90 owners can put their names forward and can be voted on and can get in. We have a maximum in the articles of seven, but you know, if you want to be a director, put your name forward and you will be voted on. Once the directors are elected, though, it means that they have, and I don’t want to make this sound risky or out of control because of what I’m going to come to later, but because we are directors of the Freehold company, we basically have carte blanche to do innovative commas, whatever we like. Now, in practical terms, of course we don’t. We have strong liaison with another body that’s very important to us, which is the owners committee and the owners committee. Its role is enshrined in the memorandum and articles of association of the company. But the owners committee is a group of owners who have the right to be consulted on important matters, staffing and maintenance programs, things like that. So, when the directors are thinking of doing anything major, then we run it by the owners committee and they’re very useful as a sounding board.

Mairead: How many people are on the owners committee it?

Peter: It varies. And right now it’s 9. We’ve got five blocks. We try to get two people from each block. And at the moment we want short somewhere, so we’ve got 9. But that works quite well. We meet every quarter and the board meets every quarter and we would never do anything which the oldest committee made it clear they did not want to do.

Shabnam: That’s quite a good tip for how you could manage that kind of setup if you don’t want the responsibility of being a director, which as we, you know, talk about is can be quite a lot in its voluntary role. But then you do want some input. So having representatives from each block is quite a good idea I think.

Peter: That’s exactly it. So that’s the process basically how it works.

Mairead: So you’ve got 90 flats?

Peter: Yeah,

Mairead: You’ve got 5 directors.

Peter: Yeah,

Mairead: And 10…

Peter: If we can get them

Mairead: So that’s 15 out of 90.

Peter: Which is quite high.

Mairead: Who are actively involved. Sounds great. Are you a happy crappy community?

Peter: I wouldn’t know that far. I think in 90 flats you’ve got, you know, 15 people who have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on at any given time. You’ve got, and I’m making these numbers up for the purpose of illustration, you’ve got 70 people who have got busy lives, they’ve got children, they’ve got jobs. They take very little interest in what’s going on, which is fine. So I wouldn’t say we’re happy clappy, but we have a means of getting things done which maximises the capital value of the place for everyone. And I think that’s what’s important. We don’t have bad debts. Some people pay quicker than others, yeah, but in the end, everybody pays.

Shabnam: But it sounds like it works quite well in your building.

Peter: I believe so.

Shabnam: Because you’ve got some representation from each block.

Peter: I believe so.

Shabnam: And I think people that don’t necessarily engage, it’s not a bad thing. It might be that they have a good relationship with that committee and the directors in that we trust them to look after us. And obviously directors have to act in the interest of the company.

Peter: And I think trust actually flows from transparency.

Shabnam: Yeah.

Peter: It flows from a belief that the directors and behind in the

owners committee won’t do anything that we genuinely don’t believe is in the interests of the company. So to give you another example of that, we have a 10 year of rolling maintenance plan and that is agreed every year with our surveyor who tells us what we should be doing and and we process that and we agree, disagree, we push some things out, we bring some things forward. We’ve run it by the owners committee and that’s where the big money is. But it’s all completely transparent. So everybody knows the front is being done in 5-6 years time or whatever it is.

Shabnam: Yeah, but you’re giving them that information aren’t you, you’re sharing that with them upfront.

Mairead: So we’re on governance, transparency and trust. Is transparency one of the biggest safeguards in a owner-led model?

Shabnam: Yeah, 100%. I agree with everything that Peters explained. And that’s one of the key reasons that in your setup, it generally works quite well. And I think from my time at lease and my experience in private practice, I think that’s especially at lease that was one of the key complaints we had when people used to call up for advice. They weren’t happy with service charges, they thought they were unreasonably high or works weren’t being carried out to a good standard or things weren’t happening. And I think what underpinned a lot of it was that lack of transparency. And I’ll give you an example where having that transparency in that vision of information can really turn things around. I’m a qualified mediator. And when I worked for lease, we used to do mediations for different parties. And we had one particular situation where we had two leaseholders in a building who just hadn’t paid. They owed quite a lot of service charges and the managing agent was the other party to this. But with the mediation, the leaseholders were, you know, you’re spending all this money, you’re building up the reserves and things aren’t being carried out and this is too high. And the managing agent came and actually said, look, you know, we’ve invited you before, but here is all the information. You’re welcome to come to the offices and have a look through. And just by having a look through some of that softened it. And they were like, ah, ok, we can see why this is costing this much. We still weren’t entirely happy because, you know, money is money. People find it difficult to afford things. And, and we had an agreement that they would then go to visit the office and managing agents said, yeah, we could be more transparent as well. But it just made quite a lot of difference in that personal relationship as well.

Mairead: There’s a really interesting point here about engagement. You’ve just described a situation there where information was available, but the leaseholders weren’t taking the opportunity to review that. And Peter, can I come to you on  this? What do you do when people don’t actively engage with you?

Peter: Well, it depends on what the issue actually is. So we extended the leases several years ago from 120 year lease to 999 years, which is obviously the benefit of the leaseholder. There is one leaseholder who still hasn’t signed for his extension. Now it doesn’t affect the rest of us. We’ve all got our extensions. He hasn’t signed up for his, you know, frankly if he doesn’t want to then that’s it. So at that end of the scale, he hasn’t incorporated. It doesn’t really matter. The other end of the scale, we are going through a process at the moment of upgrading our flat front doors to meet building safety standards, putting the intumescent strips around them and all of that kind of good stuff. The issue there is that these flat front doors belong to the individuals and not to the company and therefore we can’t put it through the service charge. So we can’t force people to pay for these. So what we’ve had to do is to get people to pay separately from the service charge of the 90, we’ve got 80 people signed up for this now.

Shabnam: That’s pretty good.

Peter: Yeah, it is pretty good. There’s still 10. Who haven’t. And we have now to decide what we are going to do about these 10. It is in the lease that they have to comply with regulations, which makes a pretty standard thing for leases. And therefore if people won’t get the work done through the scheme that we are organising, we’ve organised a contractor to do all of this. If they won’t join up with that scheme, they can get their own contractor to do the work. If they won’t do either of those things, then we’re unfortunately we’re going to have to take legal action against them. If Co, as in this case, the PAP has got its obligations and we can’t just say Oh well, it’s too bad. Plus it’s not fair on everybody else who has contributed. Fortunately, though, this is a very unique occurrence and we’ve never been in this situation before.

Shabnam: It does come up, the fire safety side of it does come up a bit, especially with the right to manage setups, especially if you’ve got a niece, where it’s individual responsibilities. They might collectively, if you’re transparent, you give them information, they might collectively agree that it actually makes a lot more sense for the company to engage a contractor and we all just contribute.

Peter: That’s exactly what we’ve done.

Shabnam: And it might cost less that way,

Peter: Yeah. Yeah.

Shabmam: So to speak.

Peter: Well, it’s a way to do it because A, it might cost less, B, there’s a lot of people out there who will gold plate this kind of work. Yeah, vastly over specifying. We have some experience of that. So what we’re doing is absolutely what you’ve got to do, but it’s not gold plated. There have been occasions kind of in the middle where we, the board and to set extent the audience committee have not wanted a resident and owner rather to do something. But we haven’t had a legal right to stop them. We have just made it clear to them that we just don’t think this is, you know, the right thing that you should be doing. And two cases that I can think of where the owners have said, alright, then we want to leave here. We don’t want to upset people, so we won’t do it.

Mairead: That’s a really interesting point about communal living, because you are not doing what you want in your own home because you recognise that you’re part of a community. Do you think that you get that because you have this share of freehold model and it will be replicated in common hold or?

Peter: I’ll tell you why I think it is. I think it’s because we’ve got 5 directors and 9 owners committee members. So if I can Marshall 14 people and generally speaking, I mean obviously you can’t say always the case. But in that group, mostly people have a very common outlook because all of the directors and all of the owners are pretty long standing people and mostly they live there. Some, some don’t, but most people live there. And so mostly have a common view. And if you can Marshall 14 people out of 90 who say I really wish you weren’t going to do this, then it carries some weigh actually.

Mairead: Good numbers, proportionally, isn’t it?

Peter: Yeah.

Mairead: Shabnam, just coming to you on the point that Peter’s made that there might be a circumstance where the leaseholders have to rely on what the lease says to get people to perform their obligations. How important is that, and is there some equivalent in commonhold?

Shabnam: Yeah. So it’s a good question. So I mean, I think that’s one of the problems with the leasehold at the moment is that if I own a flat on a leasehold, then there’s going to be a lease document that I need to understand. And you get really intelligent people, really smart people that don’t particularly grasp the concept of leasehold because it is complex. And I think it’s important to note that I think we’re one of the only countries in the world that has a leasehold system and where we’re living in a much more connected world. We’ve got a lot of people living here or overseas investors and it is quite alien to them and used to get this quite a lot. You know, why am I paying towards the roof? I live on the ground floor for example. But if you look at their lease, it’s usually going to be in the lease. But I think that’s one of the problems with lease documents. There’s legal jargon. There’s lack of punctuation, which Increases ambiguity, doesn’t it really? And we often get asked a question about a lease which we don’t always have 100% answer to because it’s not clear. And I think what commonhold is trying to do that I think will be an improvement on that is to bring in this commonhold community statement, which is going to be a largely prescribed document. And my understanding is it’s going to be much clearer. You know, it’s going to be clear that these are my obligations as a commonhold unit owner and this is my proportion, this is what I pay towards common areas, for example. So I think that hopefully there’ll be less room for interpretation or misunderstandings or not construing the lease in the correct way. But as we said before, there will be some scope for that commonhold association to vary or add to that commonhold community statement. So I think the bottom line is that whether we have a commonhold or a leasehold, there needs to be something in writing that largely talks about how we deal with this, how we run the show, so to speak.

Mairead: But is it enough to have it in writing? Because people need to understand it, don’t they? Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s where we think who’s responsible for making people understand it, just like who’s responsible for making people understand when they buy a leasehold property, you know, and the reality is you will engage an Eagle expert if you buy a commonhold unit and you would expect them to have some responsibility of saying, you know, like you have now with a lease, a solicitor or conveyancer will give you a report on that lease, which is kind of like a snapshot where they picked out the main bits. And we would need the equivalent when you’re buying a commonhold unit. But I think what really underpins that although is leaseholders and new commonhold unit holders, buyers, they’ve got to be engaged, they’ve got to understand that. And this free sounds a bit cliche, but I’m sort of a huge fan of education, empowerment and engagement. And I think it’s really important that we as homeowners or whether it’s investors, we’ve got to take some responsibility for that ourselves. You can’t just rely on a legal expert, especially if you’re trying to cut costs when you’re buying a property. Let’s be honest, people tend to complain about conveyancing costs, which I find quite extraordinary. It’s one of the biggest investments you’ll make. But we’ll try and save £500 and go to a one stop shop where they’re just overstretched. And the reality is they’re not going to be able to tell you every single thing. So I think the people need to take some responsibility. And you know, there’s resources out there as well. So there’s organisations, leasehold Advisory service, there’s the Property Institute, TPI, and there’s also the FPRA, the Federation of Private Residence Associations. And they’ve got lots of useful material literature, they’ll run, trainings and events, and I’m sure they’ll be doing more of that with commonhold.

Mairead: We’ve just completed a couple of consultation documents for the government who are seeking views on the direction that commonhold should take. And one of the questions in those consultations is should there be training available for directors of new common hold associations? Peter, you’re a director. What do you think?

Peter: Yeah, I think it’s very important to have training for directors on the obligations that they’re taking on and their role. Having said that, I think you’re going to be slightly careful because what you want to do is to scare people off. I do think directors need some training and education on what their rights and what their obligations are and what they are able to do, what they’re not able to do. And the reason I’m making this point is that sometimes I think training even more kind of downside than upside, if you see what I mean, rather than saying it’s a great role. You can contribute to your community, you can do these wonderful things, you can help people, which I I’d like to think that’s one of the reasons that we do it rather than focusing on the negative side, which is if you don’t do this, then you’re into, you know, the sky’s gonna fall in.

Shabnam: It’s a good point you make  though, because I think there should be training for directors and I work with DPI on training specifically on that, you know, prospective directors or already directors. And one of the things that comes out of that is some people they’re just not keen on becoming directors because they’re scared. So I agree that there has to be some sort of a balance in that training. So maybe there’s scope as part of the consultation even when we’ve got the ACT in that maybe there should be representatives, you know, directors that are actually involved in developing that training.

Peter: I mean. I can’t think of anything that I could possibly do that would be resulting bad things happening. I really can’t.

Shabnam: That’s the reality, isn’t it.

Peter: I can’t really think of anything actually other than for example, if we completely ignored the HRB.

Mairead: So just to explain, you’re a high rise building.

Peter: Yeah.

Mairead: And you therefore must comply with the positions of the building safety act.

Peter: Yes. If we completely ignored that and said too bad, we’re just not doing it, then I can imagine that in probably several years time, actually at this rate, something bad might happen. You have to be quite wilfully negligent to put yourself in a bad position.

Shabnam: For something bad to happen and you said before in your building the direct design up for a two year down. Yeah, I think that’s really good as well, because one of the things that came out of the work I’ve done with TPI is that it can be stressful. And I think if people see that stress, that can put them off becoming directors. And you sometimes get people stuck in a director role, maybe because nobody else wants to do it. But I think as you say, there’s that two years cycle that’s quite good.

Peter: My personal experience is that the work is very lumpy. What I mean by that is right now we’re agreeing the budgets and all of that kind of stuff moving into the new year. So there’s a bit to do now, but other than that, weeks can go by and I I do very little.

Mairead: PT you work with a managing agent.

Peter: I do.

Mairead: You could self manage, why don’t you?

Peter: It’s funny, you mentioned that mansion blocks like ourselves band together in Kensington and share, you know, experiences and ideas and stuff like that. And there was one group there where they actually do that. And I talked to this guy and amazed myself. I said, Oh yeah, I’ve got this little man he does all the accounting for. I think you must be joking. To me, having a managing agent means that they take care of the plumbing. And what I mean by that is the service charge demands goes down, the budgets get processed, the cash gets collected. And there’s a lot more to it than that, by the way. But there’s a lot of routine stuff under the floorboards that I just don’t want to know about. And it all works. And if there’s anything above that, which often is not like the HRB stuff, then we talk about that. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that goes on under the water line that most of the time we really don’t need to worry about. And above the water line, there’s that stuff that they need our guidance on. But self-managing the thought of doing it yourself, the stress levels will be off the scale I think.

Shabnam: Yeah. And you got to think the benefits you’re getting. I think with some share of freehold scenarios where they elect to self manage, there’s a danger though, because there’s that lack of understanding about what leasehold ownership means. And so when you’re in a share of freehold, you’re wearing all these different hats, so you’re a leaseholder. So I need to comply with my lease and maintain the inside of my flat. Yeah, that’s stuff, but. Then I’m wearing a different hat where also a shareholder in a freehold company and then you might may potentially be wearing a third hat where you’re in director. So you’ve got to understand company law and meetings and all that sort of stuff. In Shell Freehold, sometimes people forget that we still have a leasehold structure. So when we send service charge demands, exactly as you mentioned, they’ve got to be valid, they’ve got to be served appropriately within the ambit of the law. When we carry out major works, you know, if it’s costing anyonemore than £250, we still need Section 20 consultation. That doesn’t always happen and there are some blocks that maybe they just get on with it and they don’t bother with Section 20 officially. But what’s going to happen when one of the leaseholders pipes up and says, well, hang on a minute, I didn’t agree with the formal process?

Peter: And section 20 is a very good example actually, because, you know, we can get into something where we think it’s a section 20, but then something changes or the world gets broke. And then I work with our property manager of actually she advises me on we need to do this or we don’t need to do this. I’d have to find that out myself, yeah. Come on.

Shabnam: Whereas if you have a managing agent, you’d expect them to help you with that side then?

Peter: I do. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mairead: But can you divert all responsibility to the managing agent?

Peter: No, no, no, no, no. We can delegate responsibility, but we can’t delegate accountability. So responsibility means that you can delegate doing something like doing the accounting. But ultimately, although our managing agent does do the accounting, we have ultimate accountability for the accounting. It doesn’t mean that we’re managing it on a day-to-day basis, but that our accounts and we can’t say, well, it’s their fault they did it. They’re our accounts.

Shabnam: That’s so true. And I think that’s why it’s important to have that engagement. And you said to yourself, you have those regular meetings. If there’s a managing agent, it’s a good idea maybe for the managing agent to be a director. It depends on, you know the situation, but also to have the managing agent come to some of your meetings. They come to all the meetings. So there’s that engagement, isn’t it? There’s that two way relationship which I think helps it run better now. And I don’t think it’s fair also to put all the responsibility on the managing agents because the reality is managing agents they’re doing a lot and with everything else that’s coming through, there’s going to be a lot more to understand and deal with. But I just think it’s important for unit holders and leaseholders to they have to be engaged in the process.

Mairead: So commonhold is going to require engagement from residents even if the Commonhold Association elects to instruct a managing agent to help them. So do we think we’re going to see common hold spread? Shabnam, I’ll come to you first.

Shabnam: It’s difficult to say.  I mean, I think one of the problems we’ve got at the moment is that common old does need work. It needs refinement. That’s why we’ve got this current bill going through consultation. So I think we won’t know what that looks like until we have the final legislation. There needs to be more confidence for lenders. So I don’t think it’s going to blow up overnight. I think it’s going to be a very, very long time before commonhold…

Peter: What do are the issues that lenders see with commonhold?

Shabnam: I think one of the main issues is to do with the security. So one of the key differences with leasehold and commonhold is to do with forfeiture. So where you’ve got a leasehold flat at the moment, if the lease allows it, if you’re in breach, very, very last resort doesn’t happen very often in practice, but the landlord could go to court to apply for repossession. So forfeit your lease and you lose it and then everybody gets paid. But with commonhold, there isn’t forfeiture. So we don’t have the exact same thing. And I think that’s one of the things that lenders were worried about. And also it’s an unknown, isn’t it? We don’t have much experience of commonhold. Like we said, there’s fewer than 20, but what they are working on in the new bill is a sort of equivalent forfeiture, which is going to be this right to compel a sale if a unit holder hasn’t paid charges above a certain threshold. We still need to see the meat of what that looks like. So I think that might give a bit more confidence to lenders. Going to that question. Mairead, in terms of will it really take off? I don’t think it’s going to because the other reason is the conversion to commonhold is so difficult. So right now you need 100% of everybody in the building to agree. So that’ll be all the leaseholders, all the lenders, which we’ve said likely to happen in many scenarios, any intermediate landlords and any other parties to those leases as well as the landlord. So I think the road to commonhold is still really difficult, but the new bill again is looking to make it a bit easier to convert. I think they’re looking at taking that 100% maybe to seven. Is it 50%?

Mairead: 50%

Shabnam: Well, there you go. I think that will make a big difference.

Mairead: But isn’t the key point there that under the draft legislation, the leaseholders can only choose to convert to commonhold? Or 50% of the leaseholders can choose to convert to commonhold, but only if they already own the freehold.

Peter: But if you already own the freehold, then you do really have to ask yourself, what am I doing this for? Can I not make this freehold ownership model work better than having to take this, you know? Well, it is a step into the unknown, frankly, because as we’ve said earlier, it’s only 2020 developments due to the entire country. So taking a step into the unknown, if you already own the freehold, I can see how you could gradually legally enforce it on new bills, obviously. But moving from properties that already have a kind of freehold model is going to be quite. It’s going to be quite.

Shabnam: Especially if you’ve got one that worked reasonably well, like. Yours. And you’ve all or most of you have those 999 year leases and it may not necessarily make it much easier, but I think we’ve also got to bear in mind the new bill is looking to ban leasehold flats anyway.

Peter: The issue there is if I buy a flat, all I want to do is move in and have a quiet life. What I don’t want to do is to say, well, if you buy this flat, you’re going to have to move it and you’re going to have to be a director or whatever. However, it happens to be of the

common hold association.

Mairead: This has been a great discussion, but we’re going to have to wrap up. So Shabnam, I’m going to come to you first for your closing comments. You’ve mentioned there that the draft legislation compulsory commonhold for new build flats so we are likely to see commonhold grow. What are your key points?

Shabnam: Yeah. So I think you’re right, Bainer bound leasehold flats potentially developers being pushed to common old and the conversion becoming a bit easier. We will see more common holes. But I think the reality is there’s still about 3 1/2 million leasehold flats in England and Wales. That’s not going to change overnight. So I think it’s really important for leaseholders to be encouraged to engage as leaseholders right now. Look at Cheryl Freehold, if it’s an option and understand what your rights and obligations are now. But I think the other thing to bear in mind, we didn’t really touch on this so much is that even in a common old structure, you’re going to have difficult people. So I think that working together in harmony and that engagement, it’s you’re going to need that just as much in a common hold.

Mairead: Peter, what are your thoughts? What are the key considerations that you think need to be taken into account? I think you need a healthy dose of real life experience? I know leasehold is a bit of a dirty word, and probably in a lot of cases quite rightly so. However, you know you can’t use the lowest common denominator all the time as a way of setting the rules for the vast majority of where things you know probably just need a bit of tweaking to make them better rather than completely throwing the baby out with the or trying to throw the baby out with the bath of water, which I do wonder whether commonhold is doing in a lot of cases.

Mairead: So just to to wrap up, whatever the tenure model, successful shared living depends on clarity, accountability, transparency, participation and ultimately the people the furrow of all. Thank you both very much for coming in today it’s been a great discussion.

Peter: Thank you.

Shabnam: Thank you.

Mairead: You’re welcome.