Front Door Lock Needs Repaired - Living in Tenement Building

agrinnall

I don't know the type of lock the OP has mentioned, but when I had a flat in a tenement block without a factor the internals of the Yale lock on the street door would break around once a year, and for simplicity and security (mine was the first flat inside the door) I would just spend around £12 to buy a new lock and replace the inside parts. No new keys required, and none of the hassle of trying to collect £1.50 from each flat.

sgun

How has it broken? Does it just not shut at all anymore? There are various things that tend to go wrong with Cisa locks but they aren't usually very expensive to fix.

The way you really should go about repairs is to find out who owns each flat (this is actually what took us the longest when we organised a full re-roof).

You need to get write to each owner and ask if they are willing to get the door repaired. Off the top of my head I think you need the agreement of more than 50%, so that would be 7 owners in your case. (check this though).

Then you need to get three quotes and pass them around to the owners and then all decide on who to go with.

You then need to set up a no interest earning account (we used Co-op community account) and have everyone deposit their share of the money. It is a good idea to have 2 or 3 owners named on the account although you will have to all go in to sign paperwork together which is a pain...

The work has to start within 28 days of the first deposit so it is worth setting a date for this. If the work hasn't started by 28 days everyone can ask for their money back.

The money should only be released after the job has finished.

It took us over a year to organise the re-roof, but we wanted to do it properly as it was approx. £13,000 to deal with. The Cisa lock is actually broken on our block at present but as it should only cost about £80 to fix we are probably just going to get it done and then people can pay if they want to (we will tell them first but won't go through the whole legal route).

I don't think you would get a statutory notice as it wouldn't count as an emergency. Also, you would probably pay at least 4 times as much.