Park Home Life Continued

Park Home Life Cont ………

Now that we have established what a Park Home is we can turn our attention to the piece of land that it rests upon. This is commonly known as a pitch, and although you may have purchased your Residential Caravan outright and therefore own it, you will not own the land it sits upon. It is extremely rare in the U.K. to be able to purchase a "pitch" freehold on a licensed site. It is not in the interest of the Park Owner to do this. It is also extremely rare to be able to lease this "pitch", again it is not in the interest of the Park Owner, furthermore a lease may incuur rights under a landlord and tenant act, which again most Park owners would seek to avoid. Usually you are granted a term of years that you can keep your Residential Caravan on a "pitch", and for that you will have to pay a monthly "pitch fee" which will be subject to annual rises, which may be fair or unfair, increasingly Park Owners are been accussed of being excessive when it comes to calculating "pitch fees". In addition to the "pitch fee" council tax is also payable usually at band A level. Both off these costs per year will probably average £2.5K per annum. You will also be subject to numerous rules and regulations made by the Park Owner, some of these rules are designed for living in harmony and are common sense, however there are a growing number of unscrupulous Park Owners who are manufacturing rules and regulations to suit their own purposes, which examples of will be given later. Normal rules and regulations include such things as to how many visitors you may have, especially children which are normally subject to weekend visits only especially if they are sleeping overnight, whether or not you can wash your car on site and repairs to motor vehicles are usually barred except by recognised breakdown services, how you would like to arrange your garden and plants or shrubs are usually subject to permissions, whether or not you may have permanent visitors residing with you such as family members, the list can be never ending, but certainly some Residential Parks in the U.K. are getting seriously bad press for the way they run their sites. If you want freedom of movement and actions then perhaps Park Home life is not for you. Many Residential Caravan owners are experiencing problems if they decide they want to sell up and move on, firstly they have to have permission from the Park Owner, secondly the owner has to pay 10% commission to the Park Owner if such a sale is agreed. Currently Park Owners have the right to vet any prospective purchasers and can refuse with little reason to allow a sale. Furthermore this problem has become so wide spread that a phrase has grown up to be known as "Sale Blocking", whereby the unscrupulous Park Owner can virtually stop any chance of an owner selling what is effectively theirs, in the hope that eventually the Caravan owner will become so fed up, they end up selling the caravan to the Park Owner for a fraction of its true value, this then allows the Park Owner to sell to anyone he likes for a vast profit. Another problem that is increasingly coming to light is, that the unscrupulous Park Owner wants to have a turnover of Residential Caravans, so after a given period of time pressure is brought to bear on current owners to upgrade their existing Residential Caravans to new ones, when the owner shows reluctance to do so then Rules and Regulations change and this then becomes bullying or harrassment. There are many recorded cases of this type of behaviour and the reader will be directed to information sources at the end of this article.

To be continued ..............