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Is it human nature to get away with what one can? I ask this because the property industry tends to highlight the behaviours and characteristics and exaggerate them. With how some leaseholders squirm in paying up and needto be forced to take their responsibilities on. How some freeholders will try every trick in the book to extract more and more cash from a site, even trying to charge rent for the bin store in one case!
But managing agents and lawyers seem to obfuscate and hide more than most. We are picking up an awful lot of review work whereby we will investigate and resolve situations where charging is high and management service poor.
In one case we are seeing changes in year-end numbers for a set of accounts that bear no relation to each other, for example for the same year end repairs are £30,000 in the first produced set of accounts and £14,000 in the next. We will interrogate and investigate for the leaseholders to get to the bottom of what is going on.
It is entirely possible there is nothing untoward; but for transparency, service and reassurance leaseholders do need to see and understand what is happening.
I do find it odd that the coalition and Grant Shapps in particular cannot see that regulation would be good and much needed. They seem to have a myopic “Animal Farm” view on regulation – it is all bad. Well aside from the day job a lot of energy is going in lobbying and pushing to try to get them to see what good it would do.
10 Aug 2010 08:40:45