• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Before Header

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
Donate

Leasehold Knowledge Management Logo

Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold reform

Mobile Menu

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
  • Advice
  • News
    • Find everything …
    • About Peverel group
    • APPG
    • ARMA
    • Bellway
    • Benjamin Mire
    • Brixton Hill Court
    • Canary Riverside
    • Charter Quay
    • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
    • Cladding scandal
    • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
    • Commonhold
    • Communities Select Committee
    • Conveyancing Association
    • Countrywide
    • MHCLG
    • E&J Capital Partners
    • Exit fees
    • FirstPort
    • Fleecehold
    • Forfeiture
    • FPRA
    • Gleeson Homes
    • Ground rent scandal
    • Hanover
    • House managers flat
    • House of Lords
    • Housing associations
    • Informal lease extension
    • Insurance
    • IRPM
    • JB Leitch
    • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
    • John Christodoulou
    • Justin Bates
    • Justin Madders MP
    • Law Commission
    • LEASE
    • Liam Spender
    • Local authority leasehold
    • London Assembly
    • Louie Burns
    • Martin Paine
    • McCarthy and Stone
    • Moskovitz / Gurvits
    • Mulberry Mews
    • National Leasehold Campaign
    • Oakland Court
    • Park Homes
    • Parliament
    • Persimmon
    • Peverel
    • Philip Rainey QC
    • Plantation Wharf
    • Press
    • Property tribunal
    • Prostitutes
    • Quadrangle House
    • Redrow
    • Retirement
    • Richard Davidoff
    • RICS
    • Right To Manage Federation
    • Roger Southam
    • Rooftop development
    • RTM
    • Sean Powell
    • SFO
    • Shared ownership
    • Sinclair Gardens Investments
    • Sir Ed Davey
    • Sir Peter Bottomley
    • St George’s Wharf
    • Subletting
    • Taylor Wimpey
    • Tchenguiz
    • Warwick Estates
    • West India Quay
    • William Waldorf Astor
    • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
  • [Custom]
Menu
  • Advice
  • News
      • Find everything …
      • About Peverel group
      • APPG
      • ARMA
      • Bellway
      • Benjamin Mire
      • Brixton Hill Court
      • Canary Riverside
      • Charter Quay
      • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
      • Cladding scandal
      • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
      • Commonhold
      • Communities Select Committee
      • Conveyancing Association
      • Countrywide
      • MHCLG
      • E&J Capital Partners
      • Exit fees
      • FirstPort
      • Fleecehold
      • Forfeiture
      • FPRA
      • Gleeson Homes
      • Ground rent scandal
      • Hanover
      • House managers flat
      • House of Lords
      • Housing associations
      • Informal lease extension
      • Insurance
      • IRPM
      • JB Leitch
      • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
      • John Christodoulou
      • Justin Bates
      • Justin Madders MP
      • Law Commission
      • LEASE
      • Liam Spender
      • Local authority leasehold
      • London Assembly
      • Louie Burns
      • Martin Paine
      • McCarthy and Stone
      • Moskovitz / Gurvits
      • Mulberry Mews
      • National Leasehold Campaign
      • Oakland Court
      • Park Homes
      • Parliament
      • Persimmon
      • Peverel
      • Philip Rainey QC
      • Plantation Wharf
      • Press
      • Property tribunal
      • Prostitutes
      • Quadrangle House
      • Redrow
      • Retirement
      • Richard Davidoff
      • RICS
      • Right To Manage Federation
      • Roger Southam
      • Rooftop development
      • RTM
      • Sean Powell
      • SFO
      • Shared ownership
      • Sinclair Gardens Investments
      • Sir Ed Davey
      • Sir Peter Bottomley
      • St George’s Wharf
      • Subletting
      • Taylor Wimpey
      • Tchenguiz
      • Warwick Estates
      • West India Quay
      • William Waldorf Astor
      • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
You are here: Home / News / FirstPort / Will a new spin doctor on £90,000 with ‘personal integrity’ work wonders for Peverel?

Will a new spin doctor on £90,000 with ‘personal integrity’ work wonders for Peverel?

March 27, 2013 //  by Sebastian O'Kelly

peverelpr-1Can this be our old friends at Peverel tarting up their image in leasehold management by recruiting a ‘Head of Communications” for £90,000 a year?

It sounds like it from the description …

“to restore the reputation of this multi-brand, market leading service provider with its customers, staff and the media”.

The job is based in London and New Forest and the new recruit will “need proven strategic, crisis and change communications experience in a highly customer focussed environment. You will also need to be able to demonstrate effective influencing skills, commercial awareness and personal integrity.”

Splendid. Only Peverel has to hunt with the hounds and side with the hare: its key customer is still the Tchenguiz Family Trust – the Tchenguiz brothers are after £300 million compo for their mistaken arrest in 2011 – that used to own it and which still controls up to 70 per cent of the freeholds it manages.

Ordinary leaseholders are insignificant by comparison, and are hardly “customers”.

Peverel has never been a customer focussed business. It is the creature of McCarthy and Stone, which took in over and then dumped it in the early 1990s when there was outrage at service charges.

John McCarthy, pioneer of the retirement leasehold business model, launched an £800,000 libel case against the Daily Telegraph, which spectacularly failed. It is thought among journalists of the time that the case cost McCarthy a knighthood.

Peverel was sold off to the same venture capitalists who own it now, and then sold on again to a management buyout, before being scooped up by Tchenguiz right at the end of the property boom in 2007.

Its business model has always been top down: given management contracts by developers not leaseholders. The McCarthy and Stone freeholds, now part of the Tchenguiz Family Trust, account for the bulk of these and then high-end London contracts followed during the boom from the likes of Barratt and the Berkeley Group – the latter also sold its freeholds to Tchenguiz.

The Tchenguiz, who still own one per cent of the country’s residential freeholds, brought them all under the management of Peverel in one guise or another. This was a shortlived union as the property crash – and the Tchenguiz arrests in March 2011 – pitched Peverel into administration.

Such is Peverel’s reputation that it has been dumped by Barratt, Berkeley and McCarthy and Stone. And residents at prime London sites – St George’s Wharf, Charter Quay, Chelsea Bridge Wharf, Marathon House – have also organised to get rid of Peverel.

Peverel did not resist RTM at Palgrave Gardens, near Regent’s Park, in exchange for one-year management contract
Metro Central Heights in Elephant and Castle also won RTM, but has kept Peverel on for a year

It is unlikely that that top end business – for which ousted executive Lee Middleburgh had responsibility – is coming back. There are nuances to Peverel’s behaviour, however: it has not-resisted the right to manage at 288-unit Palgrave Gardens, near Regent’s Park in central London, in exchange for a one-year management contract. A similar arrangement exits at the massive 422-unit Metro Central Heights, south of the river at Elephant and Castle, which won RTM in November.

But the bulk of Peverel’s business is retirement leasehold and non-prime London odds-and-ends it picked up during the boom years. Both will continue to drain away as competitors that do not have a reputation in need of being restored enter the market and savvy leaseholders realise that there is an alternative.

Peverel has confirmed that it is appointing a head of communications.

Related posts:

Default ThumbnailIs Peverel gearing up for another sale? Default ThumbnailPeverel loses 2,376 prime London units Default Thumbnail‘Not everything about Peverel was wonderful,’ says Janet Entwistle Default ThumbnailJanet Entwistle: ‘There are problems with Peverel’s reputation, but new owners are in it for the long term’ Default ThumbnailJanet Entwistle: ‘Problems with Peverel’s reputation, but we are in it for the long term’

Category: FirstPort, NewsTag: Peverel

Sign up to the LKP newsletter

Fill in the link here

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @LKPleasehold

Mentions

Anthony Essien (34) APPG (44) ARMA (91) Benjamin Mire (32) Cladding scandal (71) Clive Betts MP (33) CMA (46) Commonhold (56) Competition and Markets Authority (42) Countryside Properties plc (33) FirstPort (55) Grenfell cladding (56) Ground rents (55) Israel Moskovitz (32) James Brokenshire MP (31) Jim Fitzpatrick (36) Jim Fitzpatrick MP (31) Justin Bates (41) Justin Madders MP (75) Katie Kendrick (40) Law Commission (61) LEASE (68) Leasehold Advisory Service (65) Leasehold houses (32) Liam Spender (39) Long Harbour (51) Lord Greenhalgh (32) Martin Boyd (87) McCarthy and Stone (43) National Leasehold Campaign (42) Persimmon (49) Peverel (61) Property tribunal (49) Retirement (38) Robert Jenrick (33) Roger Southam (47) Sajid Javid (38) Sebastian O’Kelly (67) Sir Peter Bottomley (211) Taylor Wimpey (106) Tchenguiz (33) The Guardian (33) The Times (34) Vincent Tchenguiz (45) Waking watch contracts (40)
Previous Post: « LKP wins Best Online Editorial at LSL Property Press Awards 2013
Next Post: Dead squirrels in the roof and rivulets of water down the walls … couple feel let down by Peverel »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. OMhostage

    March 28, 2013 at 3:29 am

    Financially Electra are, of course, very much the junior partner to Chamonix (the fool in the deal? Sorry, I’ll get my goat). I doubt either have any clue as to the number of impending RTM actions. They’re desperate to play ball now with leaseholders because it’s the only chance they have!
    Unless of course Vincentbaby wins big and leaseholders and other benighted taxpayers have to pony up so he can buy his toys back.

  2. Michael Epstein

    March 28, 2013 at 5:14 pm

    It is of interest to note Peverel feel the need to appoint someone to restore their reputation to the staff. whilst probably unintended this is the first public acknowledgement from Peverel that they have problems with their staff.

  3. admin

    March 28, 2013 at 5:33 pm

    I am still awaiting confirmation from Peverel that this is their appointment.

  4. LHA

    April 8, 2013 at 9:24 am

    This is an appointment by investors thinking like investors with solutions form a particular culture. For free, I could invigorate the company with the same advice I gave at its fall- back to basics. Focus on acting as trustees and stewards of everyone’s interests and address issues that need doing and enlarge the role and resources of the PM to address them. They need the Comms help, not to cross sell or asset manage, but build trust with residents and deliver on agreements made. Residents and PMs need to be allowed to cut loose from being tied to contractors and providers tied into commercial arrangements, whether that be insurers or window cleaners, and it must be said the banks. Retaining those arrangements is possible if the appointment is competitive and transparent.

    When that is done, people perceive a good core service and don’t object to the asset management of fees here and there.

Above Footer

Advising leaseholders. Avoiding disasters.
Stopping forfeiture. Exposing abuses. Urging reform.

We depend on individuals for the majority of our funding.

Support Us and Donate

LKP Managing Agents

Become an LKP Managing Agent

Common Ground
Adam Church
Blocnet property management2

Stay in Touch

To achieve victory in the leasehold game where you are playing against professionals and with rules that they know all too well - stay informed with the LKP newsletter.
Sign Up for Newsletter

Professional Directory

The following advertisements are from firms that seek business from leaseholders.
Click on the logos for company profiles.

Barry Passmore

Footer

About LKP

  • What is LKP
  • Privacy and data

Categories

  • News
  • Cladding scandal
  • Commonhold
  • Law Commission
  • Fleecehold
  • Parliament
  • Press
  • APPG

Contact

Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
Open Data Institute
5th Floor
Kings Place
London N1 9AG

sok@leaseholdknowledge.com

Copyright © 2025 Leasehold Knowledge Partnership | All rights reserved
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership Limited (company number: 08999652) is a company limited by guarantee that is a registered charity (number: 1162584) with the Charities Commission.
LKP website is hosted at www.34sp.com
Website by Callia Web