© 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.
You rent for some years, save for a deposit and then make the all-important decision: the location and price of the flat you can afford. So far so good, but if you consider the buying process to be the most important decision of all, you’d be wrong. This was the message from the recent Annual Conference of the Association of Residential Managing Agents.
Rather like the wedding and honeymoon, what seems important now is in fact the trivial preamble to the important bit – the long-term marriage. When buying that first apartment, choosing your new home is the fun bit, and then you have to live with the service charges and the way your block is managed. Like most decisions, going into this unprepared is a recipe for misery or, in some cases, disaster. But with a few simple rules to guide you, the business of leasehold property can be smooth sailing.
ARMA urges would-be leaseholders to be aware of certain crucial points when purchasing an apartment. These include who is in charge of managing the block; how the RMC is run; how much are the service charges and whether the managing agent is insured and audited.
So what can go wrong? One block using a non-ARMA member paid for insurance for public areas that in fact wasn’t appropriate: so if a tree branch, for example, had crushed a car, the lessees would have been liable. In another case, Directors of a RMC needed firm advice from the ARMA managing agent to persuade them that although they owned the freehold, they could not ignore the terms of the leases.
Whilst legislation cannot require membership of ARMA, more and more professional managing agents are joining and some housebuilders, will now only deal with ARMA agents. So remember, when you’re buying leasehold don’t just ask ‘how much?’ but also ‘how managed?’