The Other Way a Section 166 Ground Rent Notice Fails: Where You Post It

Follow-up to the last post, and well worth reading alongside it, because it involves the same statute catching people in almost the exact opposite way. 

Last time, the problem was that the notice didn’t exist at all. This time, the notice was drafted correctly; prescribed form, correct dates, all the required information. The only issue was that it was sent to the wrong address.

People tend to assume section 166 is silent on how you serve it. It is not. 

Subsection (5) says the notice may be sent by post. Subsection (6) then tells you precisely where that post has to go: to the tenant at the dwelling, unless the tenant has notified the landlord in writing of a different address in England or Wales at which they wish to receive notices under that section.

Read that again, because it cuts both ways.

For leaseholders

Let your flat out, moved elsewhere yourself and never actually written to the landlord specifying a different address? A notice posted to the flat is properly served. That remains true if you never see it. Your own tenant sitting on unopened post is not the landlord’s problem to solve. 

I have watched leaseholders discover this at exactly the wrong moment, when arrears and legal costs arrive together and the first question is “why was I never told?”

For landlords and agents

This is the side I would watch more closely. Once a leaseholder has notified an address in writing, that is the only address the statute recognises. A correspondence address picked up informally, from a sales pack, an enquiry email, a conveyancer’s letter does not count as written notification under section 166. Post the notice there instead of the dwelling, and if the leaseholder later takes the point, you are not just wrong, you are starting the whole process again from nothing.

In practice, this is more a records issue than process. Keep the written notification itself on file, not only the updated address field it produced. The field alone won’t prove anything if it is ever challenged. 

On an assignment, resist carrying the outgoing leaseholder’s correspondence address across by default. It tells you nothing about what the incoming leaseholder has notified. And where no written notification exists on file, the dwelling is where the statute sends you, so that is where you post.

None of this is particularly difficult once you know it. It gets expensive when it surfaces two years into a claim that suddenly has to be started all over again.