Sell a Short Lease Flat Fast, No Extension Needed

A lease is a wasting asset. Every year it gets a little shorter, and past a certain point that quiet countdown starts to matter a great deal to buyers and lenders. A flat that would sell in a fortnight with a long lease can sit for a year with a short one.

We buy short lease flats with the lease exactly as it is. You do not have to extend first, chase an absent freeholder, or wait out a legal process before you can move on.

The short lease is the buyer’s problem, so let it be ours. Extending a lease to please a buyer you have not found yet costs months and thousands. We take the lease as it stands and deal with the extension ourselves, after we own it.

Why a short lease scares off buyers and banks

A mortgage lender wants the lease to comfortably outlast the loan, with room to spare. As the years tick down, that comfort disappears, and the flat becomes harder to lend against and therefore harder to sell. A shorter lease also costs more to extend, which every informed buyer factors into what they will pay.

The result is a shrinking pool of buyers and softening offers, exactly the conditions a cash buyer is built for.

The 80-year cliff edge

There are two thresholds worth knowing. Around 80 years, extending a lease has historically become more expensive, because of an extra cost known as marriage value. And around 70 years, many mainstream lenders stop lending altogether.

Between those points, a flat drifts from “normal sale” to “cash buyers only” without anything about the flat itself changing. See leasehold vs freehold for how the tenure works.

You do not have to extend first

The instinct is to fix the lease before selling. Often that is the wrong move. A statutory lease extension takes months, costs a premium plus professional fees, and can stall if the freeholder is absent or awkward. You would be spending that time and money to make the flat attractive to a buyer you have not secured.

We remove the need entirely. We buy the flat with its current lease and take on the extension ourselves once we own it. Your sale does not wait for it.

How we price a short lease flat

We start from what the flat would be worth with a long lease, then account for the lease you actually have and what it will cost us to extend it:

These ranges move with the ground rent, the building, and local values. We explain each part of the figure in your written offer, and you can read how we calculate a cash offer for the method behind it.

What we need from you

• The postcode and address.
• The lease length remaining, roughly, and a copy of the lease if you have one.
• The ground rent and service charge, if you know them.
• Whether the freeholder is contactable, and whether any extension has been started.

Start an offer

If a short lease has your flat stuck, tell us about it. We will come back within 24 hours with a written, no-obligation offer and a clear explanation of how the lease shaped it. This page sits under our wider guide to selling an unmortgageable property.