Where we stand on commonhold

Most of what we write here is neutral: how the law works, what your options are, make your own mind up.

On this one we do have a view, and it seems more useful to say so than to pretend otherwise. We think commonhold is fairer than leasehold. Here’s why.

If you own something, you should own it

I bought my first flat on a bright Saturday in July and spent the afternoon walking around it thinking, this is mine. It wasn’t, quite. What I’d actually bought was a long lease — permission to live there for a very long time, granted by someone else who owned the building. They picked the managing agent. They set the service charge. I paid it. And the clock on what I owned was running down, however slowly.

Nobody explains this properly at the point of purchase. You find out later, usually when the roof needs doing and you have no say in who does it or what it costs.

Commonhold fixes that at the root. You own your flat outright. The shared parts belong to everyone in the building through an association you’re automatically part of. No landlord. No ground rent. No lease winding down. Just the people who live there, running the place they live in.

That isn’t a technical improvement. It’s the difference between owning your home and renting it very slowly.

Almost nowhere else does it this way

It’s easy to assume leasehold is just how flats work. It isn’t. It’s how flats work here.

Australia has had strata title since 1961 — you own your apartment, and an owners corporation looks after the shared parts. The United States and Canada use condominium, which does the same job. Most of Europe has some version of it. Commonhold isn’t an experiment anyone is asking England and Wales to run first; it’s the normal arrangement almost everywhere else, arriving late.

The closest comparison is the one nobody mentions. Go to Scotland and you’ll find flats owned outright, with the shared parts governed under the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004. Same country, same mortgage market, roughly a quarter of the housing stock in flats — and no leasehold. Whatever reasons there are for keeping the system in England and Wales, “it couldn’t work here” isn’t one of them.

It’s actually coming this time

Commonhold has existed on paper since 2002 and almost nobody used it, mostly because converting a block needed everyone to agree — including the freeholder, who had no reason to.

The draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, published in January 2026, drops that to 50% of leaseholders. That one change turns commonhold from a legal curiosity into something a normal building could actually do. The Bill was confirmed in the King’s Speech in May 2026 and is expected in parliament this autumn.

Be clear-eyed about the pace, though. The ban on new leasehold flats won’t switch on for years — the housing minister has said as much — and it won’t apply to existing flats at all. If you’re a leaseholder now, commonhold will be a choice you make one day, not a rescue that arrives. We’ve written more about where reform actually stands if you want the fuller picture.

There is already a version of this

Share of freehold is the closest thing available today, and plenty of blocks have done it. The flat owners buy the freehold between them, hold it through a company, and become their own landlord. No outside freeholder, no ground rent going anywhere, decisions made by the people who live there. If you can organise your neighbours and afford it, it’s a good outcome and we’d never talk anyone out of it.

But it’s a workaround, not a clean fix. Your flat is still a lease — you’ve just bought the other end of it. And there’s now a company sitting alongside your home that has to be kept alive: filings made, directors appointed, shares transferred when someone sells. Buyers’ solicitors ask about all of it, and a freehold company that’s been quietly neglected for a few years can hold up a sale for weeks.

Commonhold folds that away. There’s no lease and no separate company to maintain — your flat and your membership of the association move together, in one title, when you sell. Same principle, less scaffolding.

And yes, we’ve got skin in this

Someone will point out that we sell software to RTM companies, and that commonhold could make RTM redundant. Worth answering that head-on.

Commonhold doesn’t abolish the work of running a building. It abolishes the landlord. Somebody still has to sort the roof, collect the money, keep the certificates in date and get a decision made when eleven flats have twelve opinions. Under commonhold that lands with the flat owners — permanently, and by default, in every block rather than only the ones that fought for it.

So commonhold means more buildings running themselves, not fewer. We’re not backing it despite our interests. We’re backing it because we think buildings work better when the people who live in them are in charge, and we’d like to build the tools they’ll need.

Meanwhile

Nothing above helps you this month, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

If your building’s management is letting you down right now, Right to Manage is the route that already exists. No freeholder permission needed, no waiting for parliament. And if commonhold reaches your block eventually, none of that work is wasted — the neighbours you organised, the records you kept, the habit of deciding things together. Same job, better name.

This article sets out our own view alongside general information about leasehold reform. It is not legal advice. Right to Manage and commonhold as described here apply in England and Wales only, and reform timelines are subject to parliamentary process and may change.