[pas]

Yes, and?

But living in your own house means you have your own roof, that can just as well needs maintenance, and you also can pick a bad contractor, and so on.

There are trade-offs. And there are external costs. Having your own backyard means usually having and using a car, taking up space close to downtown (because fuck commute times, right?) for just a family (and taking up road capacity too). These are currently undervalued.

The whole housing calamity in the Bay Area (and in London and Berlin) is manifestation of exactly this. (Plus idiotic zoning laws and height restrictions, and of course grafts, bribes, corruption, and the usual.)

[spacecowboy_lon]

Its the difference between a £250,000k Job and a £10k one ogh and coordinating 50-70 different lease holder to pay their share.

Even more extream if your looking at a listed building - which I did when I was looking at buying a ex alms house listed in Pevsner (one of only two buildings of note in my home town)

[pas]

In my experience the paying the lease (or whatever the money due is formally called) is the least controversial part of it. You'll have more problems with the owners of the apartments. (So all the problems of the dreaded HOAs, exist for every building if it's owned by a group - which is quite usual in Europe.)

But these are very low-level problems, and they tend to sort themselves out pretty quickly (in ~5 years, let's say, if the building needs a renovation and the owners were not too keen on participating and saving for it beforehand).

[spacecowboy_lon]

Try getting a mortgage on a property with a short lease <60 Years it can be hard and expensive to extend the lease to make it practicabel.

[pas]

If you are getting a mortgage, you usually buy it.

Also, if you want to get a mortgage for a lease, you can, if the mortgage repayment deadline is before the lease expiry. When it comes to property banks only care about getting a notarized mortgage contract and getting on the property's land registry sheet in a first position. (And this latter part is interesting, because most land registries - as far as I know - don't really have the concept of expiring records - so you can't record the fact of your lease.)