Warehouse conversion

[jamii]

I've been looking to move to London lately and I've seen a number of
landlords with partly-converted warehouses who offer a few months free
rent in exchange for finishing the conversion eg

http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/massive-top-floor-live-work-warehouse-views-over-london-3-months-rent-free/82329852

http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/3300sqft-livework-warehouse-1-month-rent-free-next-to-canal-lovely/84918398

http://www.spacedup.co.uk/se3_lee-pub.htm

I've seen a fair few like this pop up over the summer. They typically
have electricity/heating/showers but no internal rooms and often need
painting/flooring. It would be a lot of work at the start but gives
the opportunity to create a really interesting space, especially if
you are interested in home automation / pervasive computing.

This is very much still in the idea phase but I'd like to see if
anyone else is interested in this kind of venture or indeed just has
any advice on the subject. I'll hopefully be down at the public
meeting tonight, trains willing.

Cheers

Jamie

[Yuan]

Home automation is something I'd like to get in on. I've got a few
PCBs designed for automation waiting to be manufactured - WiFi enabled
microcontrollers, relay boards, etc. for my company (Universal Air
Ltd.) that would work great in home automation projects. If you're
interested, I'd definitely like to see if there's an opportunity here
for us to work together, we might be able to contribute some hardware
for automation.

Yuan

On Oct 4, 2:40 pm, jamii <jamii...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I've been looking to move to London lately and I've seen a number of
> landlords with partly-converted warehouses who offer a few months free
> rent in exchange for finishing the conversion eg
>

> http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/massive-top-floor-live-work-war...
>
> http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/3300sqft-livework-warehouse-1-m...

[Martin Klang]

to me this looks like real estate agents being creative:
putting under-performing business properties on the market at pumped-up residential rates.

I would suggest that if you want to find run-down warehouses in out-of-town locations it is probably worth the effort to look for some that aren't advertised as (potential, make-your-own) live/work spaces.

along with the the willy-nilly, take-it-or-leave-it advice, I don't think I've ever put this many hyphens in an e-mail before.

with sincere apologies,

-m

[Ben Walsh]

Do you or anyone else reading have any recommendations for commercial
property agents (I would be particularly interested in those that
place full details of such properties online) ?

This sort of live/work space would be my "ideal home", though I would
be looking within an area that is 15 miles or less from Portsmouth and
on the mainland (Isle Of Wight is a commute too far).

[Martin Klang]

Have a look at the wiki page set up during the great space hunt [1] which resulted in lab 24.
And talk to the people who were involved.

/m

[1] http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Archive:New_Space_2010

[Nin Lil'izi]

Could there be a possiblity of a planning issue?

As, I think that making a home out of a commercial property may
require an application for a change of use to residential purposes.

[Billy]

I've been living in housing co-op's for years, and i've learned a lot
about how this sort of property management systems can work, and how
it can fail. It can be a great way of getting somewhere nice to live,
but it can also cost you both mentally, physically, and financially if
you screw up. Plan it carefully.

I was also looking at different forms of the warehouse conversions a
few years ago. My knowledge is not completely current, and only covers
the boroughs that i've looked at. There are significant differences
between the scottish laws that cover this and the english laws. There
are also large differences in attitude between the different boroughs,
and the only ones i've looked closely at recently are in London.

There are some planning issues that you'll need to consider when doing
this.

On the whole, as long as you're discreet, then living in a commercial
property is not a problem. As long as no-one official knows, then
there is nothing to worry about, just don't get caught.

However, it will mean that you will be on a commercial lease, rather
than a residential one. This means you will not qualify for any form
of rent support, you will have almost no security of tenure, and you
will have to pay the full commercial rates. I know a few folk who have
gone this route, and it can work well, as long as you have the cash to
pay for it, and are willing to deal with the relative instability of
tenure.

Most commercial landlords will want to know something about what sort
of business you are running, and if you let on that you are just
looking for somewhere to live, then they will not always be entirely
happy. Some landlords don't care, they are just interested in the
colour of your money, but that means you'll have to pay special
attention to the state of the infrastructure, as they will have cut
corners.

Converting a property from fully commercial usage to fully residential
usage is not easy. Most boroughs have strict planning guidelines and
building standards that you'll have to fulfill. The building standards
aren't designed to stop you doing this, but are designed to protect us
from Rachman-style slum-lords.

Fulfilling the building standards is not enough as far as the boroughs
are concerned. They may have some form of long-term plan for how they
want the economic developement on the borough to grow. If your
conversion from commercial/industrial usage to residential use does
not fit in with their ideas, then it will be difficult to change their
minds. It is not impossible. There's one housing co-op in Hackney that
managed to do this, but it took them years to get it right.

If you can do this successfully, then you've got a residential
property, with all that that entails. You'll qualify for hoousing
support, and you'll have to cover the council tax rather than the
rates, but depending on the terms of your tenancy then you'll have a
reasonable security of tenure.

The third option is look at some form of Live/Work unit. These are
properties that have a percentage split between the commercial use and
the residential use. According to the split, you'll pay council tax on
the residential portion, and rates on the commercial portion. You will
also qualify for the rent support for the residential section.
Depending on your tenancy, you will also have some security of tenure,
but not the full range that you'll get from a purely residential
tenancy.

The attitude that the different boroughs have towards live/work units
varies widely.

Hackney got burnt badly around 10 years ago, when some unscrupulous
landlords leased out a batch of live/work units under purely
residential tenancy's. When Hackney came looking for the rates, the
tenants got a nasty surprise in the form of extremely large bills, and
then Hackney had long and protracted court cases over the cash. It's a
situation that has still not been fully resolved. My personal opinion
is that the landlords should be liable for all of the rates, as they
were the people that were ripping everyone off, but that's still
something that the courts have to decide. Since that happened, Hackney
have made it so difficult to get planning conversions, that they might
as well have stopped it entirely.

Haringey however, has taken a different approach. They had a large
amount of commercial/light industrial property that was sitting empty,
so they were happy to let people do the conversions, as long as the
physical changes to the buildings were up to the required residential
standards. They were also happy for people to gain the housing
support, to the extent that, they would provide full housing benefit
on the complete rent, both the commercial and the residential
portions. However the tenants would still have to cover the commercial
rates as well as the council tax.

This sort of thing was started in Haringey around 7-8 years ago, and
since then there are a large number of good quality warehouse
conversion out there, but it does mean that the property market up
there is pretty saturated, so while it might be possible to get
somewhere to rent, most of the convertible properties have already
gone. The rental prices for a lot of these are usually 30-40% higher
than the standard residential properties, but you can find some lovely
places to live.


This is only a rough intro. Catch me at the hackspace and i'll be
happy to help.




On Oct 5, 12:55 am, "Nin Lil'izi" <nin-lil-...@phoenixhaven.net>
wrote:

[Joe]

I've been living in an old classroom for the last few months. Do a
Google search for "property protection". There is a trend in
businesses offering vacant property protection.

What you get is a room (or several) in a property (old university in
my case, but it's not unheard of to see old pubs, houses, or even
castles) at a very cheap rate (less than £400 ppm to be in W2). In my
case, my room is enormous for the price, and in addition to a king
size bed and 3 sofas, I also have a desk, a lab bench, and enough
floor space to work out and even ride my bike around the room when I'm
thinking.

The owner of the property gets 24/7 security (you're just a step above
squatting) from vetted tenants, and the company who supplies the
tennants gets money from both the property owner and from the
tennants.

There are several drawbacks. In the agreement, I'm not technically a
tenant, I'm an employee of the property management company, so I doubt
if I'd get many of the protections a regular tenant gets when push
came to shove. I'm also only garunteed 2 weeks notice if the property
needs to be vacated (although, I'm told they'll give me more notice if
they recieve more notice themselves). Maintenance on the property is
also the bare minimum. They only seems to be concerned with the types
of things that would constitute damage to the property (broken
windows, flooding, insects, etc.)

All in, I'm happy with the current arrangement for the price I pay,
and the community that has developed in my building is amazing. The
community itself (in my building at least) is dieing for more hacker
types to interact with the artistic types (which schemes like this
seem to attract). There is also at least one other tenant usign his
room to support an office of 3 programmers.

If you want more information, or you're curious about the management
company I'm with, let me know.

On Oct 4, 5:53 pm, Ben Walsh <benny.wa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you or anyone else reading have any recommendations for commercial
> property agents (I would be particularly interested in those that
> place full details of such properties online) ?
>
> This sort of live/work space would be my "ideal home", though I would
> be looking within an area that is 15 miles or less from Portsmouth and
> on the mainland (Isle Of Wight is a commute too far).
>

> On 4 October 2011 22:36, Martin Klang <m...@pingdynasty.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > to me this looks like real estate agents being creative:
> > putting under-performing business properties on the market at pumped-up residential rates.
>
> > I would suggest that if you want to find run-down warehouses in out-of-town locations it is probably worth the effort to look for some that aren't advertised as (potential, make-your-own) live/work spaces.
>
> > along with the the willy-nilly, take-it-or-leave-it advice, I don't think I've ever put this many hyphens in an e-mail before.
>
> > with sincere apologies,
>
> > -m
>
> > On 4 Oct 2011, at 14:40, jamii wrote:
>
> >> I've been looking to move to London lately and I've seen a number of
> >> landlords with partly-converted warehouses who offer a few months free

> >> rent in exchange for finishing the conversion- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Billy]

I know a few folk who've used this sort of thing, including a couple
of hackspacers.

It's not a step above squatting, it's squatting that you pay for...

No protection of a written tenancy, no rights as to the property, and
the two weeks notice is often ignored.

Give me a shout and i'll put you in touch with some of the housing co-
ops i know.

Even the short-life co-ops are better than this.

[Ben Walsh]

Do you know any in the Portsmouth area ?

I've got to stick around here for another year or so.

[Ben Walsh]

Probably also worth saying that I wouldn't class myself as having a
"housing need" in the social housing sense of that phrase.

I am simply exploring what opportunities there may or may not be for
shared "live/work" properties around England.

i.e. I am fortunate enough to be able to pay the market rate for
rented accommodation in my current area but the "mainstream" offerings
aren't what I really want.

[Ben Walsh]

How do you find the other people ?

I guess it is pretty much luck, whether you get on with them but what
sort of attitude do they have generally ?

Could someone hold a 9-5 job living in such an environment ? e.g. Are
you kept awake at night by noise ?

Having lived in student accommodation in my early 20s, I really miss
the social aspects of living with others now-a-days but I equally NEED
my sleep ;O)

[Philippe Bradley]

Plenty of people at the Sanford Housing Coop have 9-5s without any
issue and that's a row of 14 houses (+ 6 flats) of 8 or 9 people.
Because it's a cooperative with a lot of engagement from the tenants
(we're our own landlord) there's a lot of communication so noise is
rarely an issue.

Also we keep our rents as low as we need (hence £55/week inc. council
tax and bills despite being just a 25 min cycle to the West End).
There's plenty of very manageable, very sociable (and, importantly,
landlord-free/hands-off) living to be found out there.

[Jamie Brandon]

Wow, that was a lot more helpful than I expected. I checked out the
wiki page about searching for a space. Most of the sites I had already
seen. I am now on the mailing lists for these two which seem to be the
most useful:

http://www.londonwarehouses.co.uk/

http://www.spacedup.co.uk/

I also talked to a couple of people last night who expressed interest
but I didn't write down any email addresses. You know who you are,
send me an email if you're still interested.

In terms of avoiding getting ripped off, this is what I have so far:

- Talk to the council about any place to make sure landlord is above
board about planning permission.
- Check what council tax / rates we will be paying.
- Hire someone to come over and give an estimate for the cost of
finishing the work.
- Ensure the lease is at least a year, the rent is fixed for the
lease period and there's no way to for the landlord to end the lease
early.

Assuming the above, I don't think there is too much risk in going for
one of these.

Forming a coop is an interesting idea. I did some reading and it seems
like it would take a lot of planning to do properly. It's certainly
not something I would want to jump into right now. I think this
renting deal is a good intermediate step (less commitment, no
mortgage, already have planning permission). After a year or two
renting we might end up with a group that has a bit of experience and
is ready to form a coop and buy a place outright.

In any case, I expect to be around the hackspace a fair bit in the
next few weeks so those people who offered advice may come to regret
it :-)

[Billy]

For setting up co-op's, a good place to start is Radical Routes,
http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/ They've got some great at background
information, as well as some good templates for the necessary
documentation.

http://www.cds.coop/ are another bunch worth chatting to. They do
the housing management very well. you'll find a list of their client
co-operatives here, http://www.cds.coop/co-op-directory/az-listing/

One suggestion that my father made, is to get someone else to do the
building work, while you do the labouring. He learnt a lot that way,
and is currently re-building his fourth house.