Large amount of service charge arrears from previous leaseholder

Tiglet2

Normal procedure is that the management company issues final accounts for the year to you.

You send the final accounts to the solicitor who acted for you in the purchase.

Your solicitor then contacts the seller's solicitors with a copy of the accounts and requests that they use the retention held in the sum of £2000 to pay/part pay the arrears.

Without the final accounts being issued and passed to your solicitor, your requests for reimbursement will fall on deaf ears, unless there was a rider in the contract that gives a time limit up until you can claim. If you don't claim by the date stated, then the retention may be returned to the seller. If you are within the time limit, then providing final accounts are sent to the seller's solicitor via your solicitor, then the maximum you can claim for is £2000, since that is the amount being held.

However, you will have to pay the invoice because claiming money from the retention held by the seller's solicitor takes time to work out figures and process the claim.

rliu

Thanks all for your responses.
From reading the summary here
http://www.newsontheblock.com/service-charges/liability-of-service-charge-when-a-flat-is-sold
Basically it seems there is no legal obligation passed to a new assignee or leaseholder for arrears or debts owed by the previous leaseholder, but the landlord can still apply to forfeit the lease, at which point the forfeiture process can be stopped by payment of the outstanding service charges. It's at this appoint a determination has to be made by a Leasehold Valuation Tribunal on what should be paid by me, for the freeholder to enforce taking back possession of my flat.

At this point I'm minded to just get the seller's solicitors to send them the £2000 and go to Tribunal over the remaining amount, as the further explanation I got from the managing agent about the other £2600+ payable for maintenance and repairs indicates the previous leaseholders would have been notified of this in June 2018

G_M

Let us know how it goes.

Jeffrey_Shaw

As posted earlier:
a. the arrears are payable by whoever now owns the leasehold [= you], just as the rules for pass-the-parcel; but
b. when you bought, V's solicitors should have produced to yours a clear receipt for all service charge demanded prior to completion.


The retention is intended not to cover such arrears. Rather it covers demands issued after completion that relate to periods before completion (often because they had not yet been calculated at that point). V was the owner of the leasehold then, so V pays them out of the retention.

rliu

As an update on this, it turned out the managing agents engaged in some skulduggery and suspicious looking misinformation when the conveyancing process was ongoing. They had provided vague information on the LPE1 form they completed for my solicitors, which the Property Manager for my building actually told me during the complaints process with them, that my solicitors had never even requested from them. I'm beginning to feel that the managing agents don't have a leg to stand on, and based on my dealings with them and their Google review score, seem to be complete cowboys.