Owning your own home

Perfect time to start your own management committee?

Perfect time to start your own management committee?

Yeah this. It's a critical time to do something. You don't want an opportunistic landlord hoovering your building up and making your life a misery.

I've just found out that our freeholder has gone in to administration, not only is there our building management etc but also an ongoing party wall issue related to a block of new flats they've been building next to ours.

This is going to be fun...

You have already got the best advice on this but please let me absolutely urge you to listen to Teenslain and Howard.

When a Freeholder goes into administration, two things happen: the residents claim the Freehold, which may require some expenditure, but the value of the flats increases significantly as they'll now be share of freehold; OR, one of the vast third party Freehold companies hoover up the Freehold at auction. And any Freeholder who buys your building at auction will not have your best interests at heart.

Our Freehold was bought by a company I will not mention here as they're notoriously litigious and I don't want our erstwhile leader getting into schtuck on this one. They bought the Freehold in 2010. Since then they've extracted around £60k from residents on top of a £2500 a year service charge. They've hounded me through the courts for owning a dog (perfectly allowed within our lease, but done as retribution for me questioning the high service charge) and they've literally affected the mental health of our co-residents to the point where many have sold their flats at a loss, withdrawn into depression, and in one case, died. More economically speaking, they depressed the value of the flats to the point where one of our two bedroom flats on the Lea Bridge Road, with garden space, sold for £127k in 2017.

Get yourself organised dude. This could either end up being a wonderful opportunity for freedom, or the start of a very dark chapter in your life.