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 overcharge 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 for unsuspecting homeowners to be ripped off.
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, or ‘administrative’ charges.
The trade bodies involved in property management 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.
Following numerous leasehold scandals they now parrot “transparency” and demand regulation.
LKP is also lobbying for legislative change in leasehold, particularly to regulate managing agents who control vast sums of money without any supervision.
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.
Sebastian O’Kelly
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
sok@leaseholdknowledge.com
07808 328230
We have gone RTM 2 years ago. We then chose a new Managing agent. We are not happy with them. Peverel would like to be our replcement Managing agent, still under RTM. What do you advise?
What is the attraction with Peveral and have you looked at other managing agents?