£14,000 Fees from Landlord to Leasholders!

csgohan4

For those considering leaseholds and RTB, clearly it has it's downsides.

00ec25

patman99 wrote: »

I feel that there are the odd conflict of interests here. 30% of the cost is admin fees?. What?, how much does it cost to send a letter.
Also, the person deciding on what is needed to be done gets a commission payment based on the cost of the works?. Surely this is not legal is it?.

inflammatory nonsense

the council owns the building. The work will be done by contractors. the contractors will be directly managed by a project manager and overseen by the council as client.

the council may do its own project management using in house staff or it may use a PM contractor. Either way therein is the bulk of your admin because someone has to manage the project (and its manger if applic)

clearly you have no idea at all how a building project is formulated and how the scope of works is decided.

00ec25

Ginger_Winner wrote: »

- Some of the fees that I am unclear about are a '4.5% Consultant fee' and a 'Planning and Building Control' fee which amounts to 1.6% and 'Overheads and profit' which amounts to 4.5%. The additional costs outside of the actual building work are Preliminaries (10%) and there is also a contingency of 7.1%... so perhaps I'm getting a bit carried away in labelling these all as extra fees. My observation however, is that the works are £7.3k but the total cost is £10.3k.

consultant fee - there are a number of consultants on a large project. Is the fee against a named type of consultant? You could have one or all of: architect, structural engineer, mechanical engineer, quantity/cost surveyor, planning consultant, heath & safety, fire prevention, and/or project management consultant

planning and building control - all building work needs to be given planning permission and BC sign off. It takes time and effort to get through those stages. For large projects a consultant does that work on behalf of the client. Obviously the council itself approves planning permission but it is not the council itself who applies for planning permission, it is the contractor (using a consultant). once work starts adherence and sign off against building regulations (building control) is now legally delegated to building control consultants who do the work previously done in house by the council before the law changed to allow external companies to do that

overhead and profit is a meaningless figure shown by the main contractor as being his "profit" margin. naturally a decent contractor will have all sorts of "reserves" buried in his costings which mean his final profit will not be that figure. But hey ho that is the way the Uk construction industry has presented its costings for decades.

prelims is always a % figure and is a lump sum to cover the initial start up costs of any building project. At the most basic level it covers such things as: hoardings and scaffolding, toilet blocks for the workers, site huts, site security etc

all building contracts allow a contingency amount for obvious reasons. No one really knows what works are needed until things are opened up to daylight and you then find years of rust, rotten wiring, softer ground than expected meaning the hole to be dug and filled is much bigger than expected etc etc

Gers

From recent experience of building repairs for my mother's building - eight owners with a factor (Scotland) the contingency amount is vital.

Each of the eight owners paid just over £15,000 in December. As the work is just drawing to an end there has been more work identified: rotten lintels and window frames (only seen when some replastering was necessary), steel beams inserted through each of the four floors and then underneath each staircase etc etc.

They all received a very detailed document with everything in the project along with costings. The local authority gave a 50% grant towards the repairs (thankfully) and now send out inspectors for every completed part.

The building got to such a bad state because the sodding useless factor kept on getting patched repairs done and then signing off without inspection. Think they've all been ripped off over the past years, but at least it's now almost sorted and the building looks so good from outside after sandstone repairs and repointing. And it's sound internally too.

It is a huge amount of money so you definitely need a complete financial breakdown.