serve a section 146 notice where the amount of service charges, administration charges or ground rent owed (or a combination of all of these) unless the unpaid amount is more than £350 or consists of, or includes, an amount that has been outstanding for more than three years. There are a number of companies which specialise in buying ground rents for long term investment from landlords who want to sell their ground rents. Normally they focus on purchasing reversionary ground rents, either for initial income or for the opportunity of a reversion of the underlying property at some point in the future. The value of ground rents is affected by the rent review pattern on future income increases, the value of the underlying property, the unexpired lease length, and whether marriage value is applicable. Before selling ground rents, statute obliges the transactional parties to serve Section V notices on the long leaseholders. This gives them a two-month period in which to respond. Upon expiry of this, a transaction can proceed within 12 months at the price stated on the notice or higher. The only case in which such notices are irrelevant is for exchange of contracts on the sale and purchase of the ground rent of flats before 50% of them were sold. This then allows for the sum to pass and ground rent rights in return, even after all the flats are sold, without individual notices. However the rentcharge buyer is wise to note the pending contract on the freehold title. Before 2003 the Land Registry recorded the ground rent, and the rent is evident from the register of title from their website. From 13 October 2003 the Land Registry no longer does so, and a more studied examination of the downloaded lease is needed. Ground rent scandal In the past, ground rent was usually not onerous, at typically around £100 per year, and often freeholders would not request payment. But in the 2010s, developers and builders often granted leases for new homes with ground rents as high as £1000 per annum, with escalation clauses doubling them every 5 or 10 years. This can result in immediate and/or subsequent mortgage refusals from lenders and their valuers, which makes the property sellable below the market price. Leaseholders have a right after two years to extend a lease with less than 99 years to run and reduce ground rent to a