A flat by definition is a part of a house or a larger building. The house or building in question is usually divided up into several sections. Commonly you will find a house being divided up into flats or commercial building with the ground floor as a shop and its upper floors being divided into flats.

Most flats are rented and are occupied by people in a transition period of their lives. Such people include students, young professionals, retired people and the elderly. In recent years, Universities have developed more and more of their own accommodation and renting out to students has become increasingly more difficult for smaller property owners. Many young professionals choose to live in a flat to be near their chosen place of work. After a few years they may start a family and eventually buy a house. You will also find that older people whose children have "flown the nest" not requiring the space and not wanting the maintenance of a house preferring to move into a flat.

There are people who live in a flat long term. They probably don't have a large family and prefer not to have the maintainance chores of a house like gardening. In major cities many flats are kept as weekday accommodation by professionals for convenience. They live in the city during weekdays to be close to their place of work, only to travel back to their homes during weekends. In a similar fashion some people own holiday flats, where they may stay for a short while a few times of the year and perhaps have the flat rented out to other holiday makers when the are not using it.

In most cases, it is generally not a good idea to buy a flat especially if one intends to move on after a short while. When renting a flat on a short lease you may be responsible for decorating your flat or even no responsibilities for decoration. If you choose to buy a flat, unlike a house, the long term value of your flat would be affected by how people in your neighboring flats maintain their properties. In the most extreme cases, your neighbors could completely wreck their own flats and also undermine the value of the whole property. You may have bought your flat at a time when all the neighbors have been "good" neighbors but over time different people may come and go. Hence, buying a flat is potentially a very risky proposition.

Buying a flat is not all doom and gloom. It is better to buy a flat where a tenants association exists. Many new flat developments operate with a tenants association. The role of the tenants association is for the residents to jointly share in responsibilities like building maintenance, repairing the roof, maintaining communal gardens etc. Tenants associations may also encompass activities like community issues.

Most flat purchases involve buying a long lease where a ground rent is payable to the freeholder or head leaseholder. In major cities the freehold is often owned by a major landowner like the Crown Estates or Grosvenor Estates. Ideally the longer the lease the better, since the value of the lease gradually wastes away over time.

In recent years, there has been the development of "commonhold" legislation in the UK as an alternative to long leases. Commonhold has been used in many other countries outside the UK where long leases are not common or do not exist. Commonhold is having all the residents of a property jointly owning the property. Usually a management company is setup where all residents are joint shareholders. The management company is then responsible for the maintenance and other issues that affect the residents jointly. To find out more about the developments of commonhold legislation, look at this web site: Land Registry: Commonhold.