How much?!

I recently made a casual enquiry to the owners of the building we own a flat in about extending the lease. With 90ish years on it I was curious what it might cost to add another 90.

The response was surprising.... for £2000 plus £895 solicitor's fees we would get a new lease for 99 years (NOT in addition to existing 90 years, instead of) and they would increase the ground rent from £30 a year to £100 a year (with a proviso that it would increase to £400 pa by 2030)!

So for nearly £3k we would get a substantially increased annual ground rent and 9 years added to the lease, hows that for value for money?!!!

So a bit of searching online and it seems quite clear that in UK law, because we have owned the lease for more than 2 years and it is a long lease (more than 21 years left) we should be able to insist on adding 90 odd years to the existing lease AND not pay any more ground rent. That's a bit different to paying for the privilege to pay more ground rent and less than 10 years adding to the lease!

We should still expect to in the region of £2-3k all in, but that sounds like a much better deal to me than offered by the management company's solicitor.