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QUESTION I am director of a leasehold property of 44 flats in Putney London. We are managed by a large, local management agent. Recently my fellow Director and I discovered that the previous building manager made payments to contractors without informing the directors. He also arranged an insurance claim from our block policy for an extraordinary amount for a leakage into another flat. He paid the excess from our funds, once again without informing the directors. The manager left the company in February this year, and we have made several complaints and demands for a full investigation into his conduct while he was managing the property.
to deal with insurance claims and instruct works without additional authority. You could also investigate whether or not the decisions made by the managing agents were reasonable and look into taking action for negligence, however this will be completely dependent on the facts and the actions taken. Finally, this appears to be a task for a solicitor dealing with a breach of contract or possible action in negligence. Alternatively you could complain to the property ombudsman or ARMA and highlight to them the issues in light of you being ignored by your previous managing agents. If you would like some more detailed advice then please feel free to contact LMP Law Ltd to discuss.
to our grievances to date, the new manager just keeps repeating she is looking into the matter. They have not acknowledged emails in regards to our grievances which breaks their own rules. They are a member of ARMA so any grievances would have to go through them. Can you offer any advice? ANSWER Many thanks for your query relating to your previous managing agent. I am sorry to hear about the issues that you are having, obviously I have a limited amount of information to hand, but speaking generally I will make the following observations. You need to check the terms of your management agreement with the previous agents, was there a specific clause within the agreement that meant that the agent was required to inform the
board of directors for expenditure?
Often when a managing agent is instructed the board of directors want to leave it to them as the professional agents to simply get on and manage the development. It hoped that the managing agents will act in line with their agreement and have the best interests of their clients when arranging for works and contracts etc. Likewise, where there is a hands on board of directors, they may leave standing instructions with the managing agent to run items of expenditure over a certain amount past the board before being authorised to proceed. With regards to your situation whether or not action can be taken will be down to the terms of the managing agreement as per the above, if the agreement afforded the managing agent a wide discretion then it will not be uncommon for the managing agent
Peter Cornell, Director at LMP Law
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O ver the course of a recent long weekend, there were several Teams chats (other software is available) that referred to one large site and what sounded like a much younger caller than we are used to. The calls were all perfectly pleasant and each time a routine question regarding ordering new fobs or confirmation of concierge hours for example was asked. No individual staff member took more than one call but toward the end of the three days it had been
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remarked upon several times. Two days later we received an email via our client from a resident who apologised on behalf of his 13-year-old son, who had made 20 plus calls over a week, both in and out of hours, to the managing agent in order to “test” response times for a school project about customer service!
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