New build insist we buy our gas and electric through a management company

oneiainwilson

Hey there, sorry if I'm cross-posting, but I've spent a while searching and can't find any details on this. I usually find most sage advice on these forums!

We're interested in buying a shared ownership flat but once we exchange, we will be debited £100/month for gas and electric. Each property is metered and will then be rebated accordingly (or charged even more?). The reason they give is that the block will use one, energy efficient (?biomass) boiler in order to benefit from government incentives on building.

Our sales person said they can provide no details on tariffs because they won't know until the boiler is installed. They have done something similar in Greenwich but with a different management company, and couldn't provide details about those tenants' bills. She insisted that a Housing Association is a charity and has no intention of ripping us off...

LandQ will use a group called Insight to do all this. Does anyone have any info around this? Or useful links? Is this legal, should I tell Ofgem? I'm all for communal purchase of energy and green energy. I'm not for getting ripped off.

bengasman

If you have your own individual gas and electric meter, you can get your bills from whoever you choose.
If you don't have your own meters, you just accept the lease as a whole, or you don't and buy or rent privately.

Pincher

A housing co-op providing cheap RENTED accomodation would be shooting itself in the foot if they tried to extort money from the residents.

A housing co-op that manages on behalf of half-share owners may have other ideas, especially when they become full owners and sell for a profit. This is what happened to council tenants under right-to-buy.

If the management company wants to extract money out of you, they just have to demand maintenance costs for all sorts of items. With a metered service, all they can do is inflate the gas price, which should be visible in the accounts. So, worry about the service charge getting to £20,000 a year, but not the gas heating bill.

I have a flat with a central boiler in the basement. Good stuff. If each flat had it's own gas supply, and the standing charge is £100 per account, we would be paying £100 x 100 = £10,000 in standing charge every year!

A. 100 individual gas boilers, maintained and then replaced every ten years.

B. Three industrial sized boilers, so if one or two stops working, yoiu still have heating. Mantained professionally, cheaper bulk contract gas price.

Which is cheaper, less hassle, more reliable. A or B?

oneiainwilson

Cheers for the comments. just to clarify, althoug there are meters, we have no boiler of our own. everything is done communally, so i can't buy from any provider i like.

I hope logic dictates it should save money and be more covenient. cheers for tip about service charge.

magyar

oneiainwilson wrote: »

LandQ will use a group called Insight to do all this. Does anyone have any info around this? Or useful links? Is this legal, should I tell Ofgem? I'm all for communal purchase of energy and green energy. I'm not for getting ripped off.

It's legal. What I would agree with is making sure that whatever management contracts you have stipulate that

- the owners or lessees have a right to get an annual (or maybe quarterly) statement showing their actual costs and this should also clearly state whether there's any profit margin in there.

- you have the right for these to be audited. You probably won't bother, but it's useful to have the right.

- you should also receive the benefits of any renewables subsidies they get as a result of this being a biomass boiler. Hard to say what they would be until you actually know.

Your solicitor should be able to run through this with you.

oneiainwilson

cheers, we'll try that.