Featured Articles

Within each industry sector, there are game changers and champions, and in the leasehold sector Alex Greenslade stood apart as a character of integrity and drive.    His sad passing was a huge loss to our specialist sector where many had known him as a friend, as well as a colleague and sometime adversary.    Alex co-founded the professional membership association ALEP with his sister Anna Bailey in 2007. Alex had worked with leaseholders since 1998, and he was also co-founder and Chairman of the Leasehol

Independent property consultants and chartered surveyors Pennycuick Collins have appointed two new team members to their award winning residential management team. Andrew Winstanley joins as a Senior Property Manager working alongside Director Lyndsey Cannon-Leach and Associate Director Dale Jones to meet growing demand from existing and new accounts.  He held a number of senior roles with First Port and before that SDL Group prior to joining Pennycuick Collins.  Chloe Ross has been recruited to the team

Issue 99 of News on the Block has now been published. This issues includes some of the following articles:  Tribute to an industry friend - Alex Greenslade  Technology can be key for block managers Is block management being left behind?  How to avoid the legal headaches of running a RMC  Beware of fixed charges you can’t challenge Will your spirits be dampened by a leak? When an insurance report is not an insurance report! Licence to alter: getting the balance right Brexit

SDL Surveying, part of Nottinghamshire-based property services company SDL Group, started the year in style by hosting a 007-themed charity ball on Friday 1st February, which raised over £12,000 for its chosen charity, The Donna Louise Hospice. The glamorous black-tie event held at a local venue, The Carriage Hall, was the perfect setting for an action-packed night of entertainment, reception drinks and dinner. The headline feature of the event was its charity auction, led by SDL Auctions’ managing direct

Brethertons is pleased to welcome Roy Magara as an Associate to their Employment team.   Roy brings a wealth of expertise in both contentious and advisory elements of the law including discrimination, whistleblowing claims, restrictive covenants, breach of contract claims, settlement agreements, unfair dismissal claims and harassment claims.   He is a specialist Associate with Higher Rights offering our customers seamless representation from the onset of a matter through to representation at an Employment

Principle Estate Management – one of the UK’s newest but most experienced property management companies – is using the very latest technology to make its surveys are faster and even more accurate. The Birmingham-based company, which manages contracts nationwide, is using the MRI Qube PM Site Survey app as a bolt-on to its property management software system, also provided by MRI Software. The app is designed to assist mobile operations and keep costs down, enabling staff to easily access and record proper

The CIS Tower has been part of the skyline of Manchester since 1962; an iconic, landmark tower symbolising the prominence and growth of the city.    Management of this Grade II Listed skyscraper on Miller Street has been handed to Lee Baron, the property and management agents, based in King Street Manchester. At 387 feet high, the tower is the second tallest building in Manchester and the twenty-eight storey 388,000sq. ft office building dominates the 1.5-acre site.   Lee Baron’s role will be to provide a

Dampness is something many people associate (rather unfairly) with Manchester, where our EKA North office is located. I say unfairly as Manchester isn’t actually the wettest City in the UK – it’s not even in the top 10. Anyway, dampness was on my mind so I recently reviewed all the damp/water ingress investigations and reports that I’ve written over the past few years, curious to discover what percentage of these related to a certain type of damp issue e.g. condensation or poor maintenance of building ele

Major works can be a major headache for property managers, but a good building surveyor can make the process that much easier from start to finish. The key is to understand how your surveyor fits into the process, and how to get the most out of them so you can focus on your job.   For a major works project to be successful, the property manager and building surveyor have to work as a team, each playing their part in getting the job done for the client. As a technical expert, part of the surveyor’s job is

We are delighted to announce Andrew Morgan (Partner) who leads the Corporate and Commercial team at JPC Law, has been invited to sit on the board of West London Business (WLB).   West London Business is a non-profit business leadership forum and its mission is to ensure West London is the best place to do business. Covering the areas of Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Harrow, Hillingdon and Hounslow, since the early 1990’s, West London Business has sought to ensure the sub-region is the best

QUESTION I'm wondering what it would take to ‘force’ my freeholder to surrender the freehold on my London flat. I think I can claim against him dereliction of duty.  September last year my (serial) Freeholder took me to court claiming I owed him £8000 in back insurance. My defence was that he broke the terms of his own lease. It states that he had/has to supply me with a copy of the policy and receipt each year on my requested. But he never did. So 17 years ago I started to buy my own insurance. I won

I decided to write a blog about PropTech and its implications for property managers and their employers. So to get a sense of what property management was like before the Landlord & Tenant Act 1985, I asked some PMs with grey (or no) hair for their recollections.   Some of it was unprintable but here are some edited highlights:   Dictating letters into machines using tiny cassettes Returning from a site visit to dozens of Post-It notes DX-ing a tree’s worth of paper to vendors’ solicitors Filing cab