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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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What is LKP?

August 1, 2012 by

The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership exists to protect ordinary leaseholders from being fleeced by landlords and their agents. They exploit the many opportunities offered by this flawed form of property tenure.

The LKP seeks to identify and accredit property managing agents who sign up to open accounting and straight dealing.

They charge a clear fee for property management – often on behalf of the residents’ own management companies – and do not pocket commissions offered by insurers, energy companies and assorted service providers.

In short, they don’t collude with others to cheat the residents, which is particularly depressing to encounter with the elderly in retirement developments.

To be accredited, LKP managing agents must sign up to a 35-point accreditation process, and residents in the blocks they manage are selected at random to provide references.

LKP also provides an editorial service for leaseholders.

Leasehold is a murky little corner of residential property, but with 1.8 million leaseholders and £3 billion a year spent on service charges there is huge scope to cheat unsuspecting homeowners.

Redress is complicated and expensive and, if you lose, all the freehold landlord’s legal expenses – barristers are now routinely used in LVTs – can be reclaimed in the service charges.

The trade bodies involved in property management – the Association of Residential Managing Agents (ARMA), the Association of Retirement Housing Managers (ARHM) and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) – have been well aware of abuses in leasehold management for years.

They all have codes of practice that are feeble and discretionary, and that have well attested loopholes – even RICS, which is the only serious professional body among them.

Following numerous leasehold scandals – often involving ARMA and ARHM members – they now parrot “transparency” and demand regulation. Previously they were silent, and neither ARMA nor ARHM has ever publicly expelled a member.

LKP is also lobbying for legislative change in leasehold, particularly to regulate managing agents who control vast sums of money without any supervision. We have instigated debates in both the Commons and the Lords on these issues.

Of course, the ideal solution to leasehold is to stop building any more of it, and instead to build commonhold – which is what applies in the rest of the world, outside England and Wales.

There is a mass of information on this site and we hope it is useful.

We welcome inquiries from ordinary leaseholders and have a network of supporters and sympathisers who have dealt with everything from £500,000 LVT bust-ups, to contested Right To Manage applications.

LKP provides no services for which there are charges. It is funded by the accreditation of participating managing agents.

Sebastian O’Kelly

Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
sok@leaseholdknowledge.com
07808 328230

 

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Seeking stars in the east

March 14, 2012 by

What picture emerges from LKP’s tour this week of East Anglia?

Apart from Cambridge, leasehold property ownership more resembles the North West than the affluent South East.

In Norwich, Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds, most leasehold flats are owned by buy-to-let investors – and so far they have proved pretty wretched investments, down 40-50 per cent since the peak.

The much heralded revival of Ipswich, with its boat-bobbing marina, has gone spectacularly phut with the end of the property mania.

One local commentator even said that Ipswich being knocked out of the Premiership was to blame as no longer did Londoners arrive by train, see the lovely marina and realize you could buy a “bargain” flat over the water.

Many are now rented out to social tenants, and the block management put in place by the developers has often been abysmal.

In affluent Cambridge the position is different and there is a strong owner-occupier market.

LKP had interesting discussions with chartered surveyor Jeremy Wager, of Cambridge Property Management.

In the new town of Cambourne, west of Cambridge, developers handed over the management of their schemes to Peverel, Trinity and Mainstay.

We also met Stephen Chard and Neil Robinson of Encore, which has 7,000 units under management in Cambridge, Ipswich, London and, within the last nine months, Nottingham and Bedford.

Stephen and Neil were large-scale residential property investors and founded Accent, which they later sold. Encore is a major property manager in Cambridge and has recently won the management of a new 200 unit Berkeley Group scheme.

In Norwich,  Guy Hudson, a multi buy-to-let landlord, set up Norwich Residential Management at the converted resi scheme Paper Mill Yard following appalling experience of national managing agents: soaring service charges, poor maintenance and ever changing property managers (who had no experience of maintenance).

With 1,500 units under management, and numerous sites around the city, he has won the contract to manage Taylor Wimpey’s NR1, which is on the opposite side of the river to Paper Mill Yard.

National outfits such as RMG, Countrywide, Remus and Mainstay (running the NU Centrale block) are all active in the city.

At Bury St Edmunds, father and son Derek and Daniel Wilson have run Temples Property Management for a number of years.

Such is their reputation that local estate agents send them putative buyers to learn the basics of leasehold ownership – and its obligations.

“If you explain the lease and the charges to people beforehand you will avoid having arguments in a year’s time,” says Daniel, who claims not to have lost the management of a block.

“It costs me far less to keep people and ensure that they are happy than it would do to go out and get new business.”

 

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