Body Corporate vs Leasehold (Ground Rent & Service Charge)

Australia & New Zealand: Body Corporate / Strata

In AU and NZ, an apartment or townhouse in a shared building is typically owned under strata title (AU) or unit title (NZ) — you own your unit outright, and a body corporate (owners’ collective) manages and funds shared building costs via strata fees (also called body corporate fees, or levies). These are usually billed quarterly.

United Kingdom: Leasehold

Many UK flats are sold as leasehold, not freehold — you own the right to occupy the property for a fixed lease term (often 99–999 years), while a separate freeholder owns the underlying building and land. This is a genuinely different legal structure, not just different terminology for the same ownership model. Leasehold typically involves two separate costs:

• Ground rent — a payment to the freeholder simply for holding the lease, historically often nominal but scrutinised in recent UK leasehold reform.
• Service charge — the leaseholder’s contribution to the building’s shared running and maintenance costs (the closest UK equivalent to strata fees).

Why Property Insights treats these separately

Because leasehold is a different ownership structure (not just a different bill), a UK property’s expense fields show Ground Rent and Service Charge as two separate line items instead of a single “Strata Fees” figure — and the label itself swaps automatically based on the property’s country setting, rather than trying to force one universal term across all three countries.

Where you’ll see it

Property → Cashflow Summary → Operating Expenses, and the Banks → Transactions category dropdown (gated to show the right terminology for the property’s country).

This is general information — confirm your specific property’s ownership structure (strata, unit title, leasehold, or freehold) with your conveyancer.