© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
In recent weeks, there have been many column inches filled with people’s views about managing agents and how ‘regulation’ is needed to solve leaseholders’ problems. Whilst I agree that something needs to be done, I get upset by the common notion that “managing agents” are ripping off leaseholders – and “managing agents” need to be controlled. The upsetting part is the concept that “managing agents” are all the same – managing agents are all ‘bad guys’ – and by implication, I am a bad guy.
In my 30+ years of hands-on property management, the vast majority of the management problems I’ve seen have involved managing agents working for freeholders. In contrast, there are relatively few problems with managing agents working for leaseholders; i.e. Resident Management Companies, Right To Manage Companies and leaseholder owned freehold companies. This is a distinction which nobody seems to have recognised – not even the likes of Baroness Gardner and the Federation of Private Residents Associations, who in recent months have been actively pushing for regulation. Everyone is wrongly using the generalisation “managing agent”. That means the ‘good guys’ who work with leaseholders, get tarred with the same brush as the ‘bad guys’ who work against them. There is the consequent danger that ‘regulation’ will be wrongly directed, hurting the good as well as the bad.
Whilst well drafted regulation could improve the leaseholders’ lot, perhaps a different approach could achieve much more. Rather than working ‘for the freeholder’ or ‘for the leaseholders’ one way to improve the situation could be to make it a requirement that managing agents work objectively, for the good of the property – and be responsible to both the freeholder and the leaseholders. If management is carried out professionally ‘for the good of all’ then the managing agent will have the incentive/requirement to find win-win scenarios, to reach agreement with all parties, and not have one side win over the other side.
And you don’t need regulation to achieve such a change – just a change of attitude by those involved; freeholder, leaseholders, managing agent. Admittedly there will need to be changes to management contracts and thought will need to be given to just how “client instructions” can be obtained in problematic situations ... and how the terms of the Lease might be interpreted if such a management structure existed. But surely if all parties agreed to enter such an inclusive scenario, all parties would pro-actively work towards a happy ending. That has surely got to be better than the present “us and them” blame culture, which is clogging up the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal system?
Food for thought? Or am I just making myself a target for all three groups to shoot me down in flames?
Bernie Wales is the Managing Director of BW Residential Property Consultancy Ltd