"The title is subject to a rentcharge of £1.85 per annum." That was one sentence in an email from our conveyancer, and I read it three times. One pound eighty-five. I assumed there was a missing zero somewhere, checked the attachment for a stray £185, and then rang Matt at school during his lunch break to say that our new house came with a yearly bill smaller than a bag of crisps.
By midnight I had read everything the internet had to say about chief rents, from the sensible (a few pence, never collected) to the dramatic (a solicitor's letter out of nowhere in 1998). Our conveyancer's reply to my list of questions the next morning was kind and short, and amounted to: stop reading.
What a chief rent is
In Sheffield they call it a chief rent, and elsewhere it's a rentcharge. It's a small fixed payment attached to the land and owed every year to whoever holds the right to collect it. Ours is not the same thing as the ground rent you pay on a leasehold flat. The house is freehold, there's no lease running down, and there's no service charge. What we have instead is an old promise, made by whoever bought this plot, that the owners of the land would pay a little something forever.
Sheffield has a lot of these because of how the city grew. In the 19th and early 20th century, landowners sold plots for building and often kept a modest yearly payment rather than taking all the money at once. A hundred years later, thousands of houses still carry one, and plenty of rent owners have long since lost track of them. Our conveyancer said the first thing they check is that nobody has been demanding it, and nobody has.
Ours, and what happened to it
The chief rent in our title comes from a conveyance of 1936. The person who holds the right to the £1.85 can't be traced, and nobody has collected it in decades. Dennis never paid it in 45 years, and Karen had no letters about it in his papers. There are two worries with something like this, as our conveyancer explained them: that the rent owner turns up one day wanting arrears, and that a lender wouldn't want to lend on a house with an unresolved charge hanging off it.
The answer to both was an indemnity policy. Karen's side paid for it, it cost £28, and it covers us if the rent owner ever appears and makes a claim. Our lender looked at the policy and was perfectly happy. Our conveyancer's tone throughout was that of someone who sees these every fortnight, which they probably do.
Why we didn't try to get rid of it
You can, in principle, pay a lump sum to buy a chief rent out, which is called redeeming it. It's hard to pay a lump sum to somebody who can't be found, and it isn't clear what we'd be buying at that price. The Rentcharges Act 1977 stopped new ones from being created and set most existing ones to come to an end in 2037, so ours will simply fall away. We decided against spending time or money on a payment that disappears on its own in twelve and a bit years.
If you have one in your own deeds, ask your conveyancer how it should be treated for your house. Every one is a bit different, and I'm only telling you what happened to ours.
We have met Maureen, who shares our party wall, a handful of times at the gate. When I mentioned the chief rent, she said Ron used to pay theirs to a man in a hat who came to the door in the 1970s with a receipt book and wouldn't come in for tea. I can't confirm any of this, and I'm not sure Maureen could either, but I'd like to believe in the hat. "Ron always said it was the only bill he never minded," she added.
I've put a note in my diary for the summer of 2037. It says "Chief rent ends". I'll be 42.
