Depending on your price range, location and preference, there are a large number of options available when buying an apartment. You will have usually far more choice than when buying a house.You can buy new, old, trendy and contemporary or grand and traditional apartments. A small or large apartment, perhaps on the ground floor or a penthouse.
Obviously, you want to buy a flat that will, with any luck, increase in value over time, but apart from the considerations of the length of the lease, management structure and leasehold/freehold issues, there is still a lot to think about.
Exploring The Types Of Flat Available
There are very many types of apartments on offer, such as:
- warehouse or other conversion from former non-residential premises
- retirement or ‘age exclusive’ apartments.
We will take a look at each of these in turn.
Conversion
These are most often Victorian or Georgian conversions, cut-downs from a bigger house, although they can also be Edwardian or 1930s semis, if large enough.
Advantages
There are not usually many apartments in each house, possibly five or six maximum. Conversions also usually have low service charges and are frequently sold with a share of the freehold. Because of the small number of units in each house, you are unlikely to get the level of administrative problems which can occur in larger blocks. Most conversions are in urban locations, and enable you to live in an area you might not otherwise be able to afford.
Newspaper stories of former broom cupboards being sold as studio apartments in very expensive areas such as Knightsbridge and Chelsea, for instance, remind us that these tiny conversions enable buyers with very small budgets to live in self-contained apartments in trendy and central locations.
If location is more important than size, then you are most likely to find what you are looking for in a conversion.
Disadvantages
In older conversions, some of the rooms may be tiny, such as kitchens and bathrooms. Also the conversion may have been done amateurishly before present day building regulations were in force. Because walls can be thin, conversions are often very noisy places to live in.
Very often, common parts are dilapidated and rundown and there are likely to be areas nobody bothers about, especially if all the residents jointly own the freehold. When I lived in a conversion, there was a cupboard at the top of one landing that seemed to belong to nobody; consequently it was full of rubbish, and none of the residents would take the responsibility of clearing it out.
In most conversions, the apartments are far from being equal in size or grandeur. There will usually be one grand flat, which constituted the family’s living quarters in Victorian days, and then as you go upstairs, the flats get smaller and less well appointed, as they were usually the original servants’ quarters.
This inequality can lead to disputes over apportionment of the service charges, especially as such conversions are usually too small to make it worth bothering with managing agents. It is most usual for one of the residents to take responsibility for management; or, as happened in my case, we took it in turns.
Conversions work well when everybody gets on, as we did, but they can be a nightmare if you have a problem or non-paying neighbour.
Common parts tend to be small and narrow landings and halls from the former house. So there is often nowhere to put bikes, for instance, which means they are found in the hall and this can look messy and depressing. There may also be problems with parking, especially where there are now four or five homes in what was formerly a single dwelling.