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Furious LVT victor complains that managing agent also sits on the tribunal panel

December 14, 2012 by

BenjaminMireA pensioner who won £3,500 at a Leasehold Valuation Tribunal has made a formal complaint that Benjamin Mire, who runs a large property management company and was criticised in the case, also sits on the same local LVT as a panel member.

“This is a clear conflict of interest and affronts every notion of justice I have ever learned,” says Colin Dennard, 71, a retired international hotelier, from Bournemouth. “I felt most uncomfortable. It is clearly wrong to have to face someone who appears as a member of the tribunal panel at the very same LVT offices.”

Dennard, who managed Carlton Hotel in Cannes and the Meurice in Paris, has sent a detailed complaint to barrister Siobhan McGrath, the head of the LVT system.

The case, in which Dennard represented friends for no fee, is the second occasion when he has faced Mire, 52, of Trust Property Management Group plc, which manages the property interests of freeholder Lakeside Developments. Mire is a chartered surveyor, which is why he is qualified to sit on LVT panels.

In his first action against Mire in 2009, who again represented Lakeside Developments, Dennard successfully insisted that the case be heard by the London LVT because of Mire’s involvement as a panel member in the southern region. He received a confidential settlement.

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Filed Under: Leasehold Valuation Tribunal, News Tagged With:

Mainstay loses prime Norwich site to right to manage

December 7, 2012 by

Nu Centrale in the centre of Norwich opted for right to manage

The 98-unit NU Centrale in the centre of Norwich has dropped Mainstay and opted to be managed by LKP-registered Norwich Residential Management.

The residents had been considering right to manage for more than two years but as 90 per cent of the block is rented out they were making limited progress contacting all the leaseholders.

Norwich Residential Management, which is run by Guy Hudson, became involved in May and achieved a majority for RTM by August.

“It was a question of searching the Land Registry for owners, knocking on doors to speak to tenants, sending out paper fliers and – which was very useful – speaking to letting agents,” says Hudson. “In the end we got there, but it did need a systematic, professional approach to get to the right numbers.”

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LKP and Carlex websites top 100,000 page views in November

December 3, 2012 by

November figures on the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and Carlex websites show a surge in leaseholder readership, with more than 108,000 page views. The figures confirm widespread interest in leasehold and in measures to reform its many abuses.

Visitors to the sites amount to nearly 23,000 – a figure that rebuts advice from the (three) officials in the Department of Local Government and Communities who have repeatedly told ministers that they were unaware of widespread dissatisfaction among leaseholders.

Leasehold Knowledge website traffic for November (left), and Carlex (right)

Ministers are at last taking note of this issue, which has undermined confidence in the leasehold housing market. Few big central London developments built in the last ten years have not rebelled against the managing agent appointed by the housebuilder. Some developers – Berkeley, Barratt, McCarthy and Stone – have realised the reputational risks of simply selling off freeholds or management contracts to the highest bidders.

The retirement leasehold market is virtually static and has proved to be a disastrous residential property investment. The consequence is a further brake on the housing market as older homeowners decline to sell their blameless freehold family houses  – the value of which has stood up very well – and downsize.

(Website “hits” stand at 223,00, but these are unreliable as every time a “hit” is recorded by the calling up of a post it includes the post’s url and all the urls of any graphics and pictures. So a post with four pictures is counted as five hits etc.)

Filed Under: Carlex, News