Challenging Service Charge Provider (Private Housing Estate)

rich20

Building insurance is covered by Gateway which owns my lease. That's another £260. 

I have my own contents insurance and don't believe this is covered as part of the service charge. 

NeilCr

rich20 said:

Building insurance is covered by Gateway which owns my lease. That's another £260. 

I have my own contents insurance and don't believe this is covered as part of the service charge. 

Okay

Then on the face of it the insurance figure stands out to me. I'd be querying as to what that covers. It's the biggest chunk of your charges.

If I am honest £500 a year doesn't seem excessively high. It's hard to compare estates but my annual figure is £580 on a freehold house and the insurance is nothing like yours

rich20

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. Seems like I'm not really going to achieve what I wanted. Lesson learnt for future house purchases. 

iampetesmith

daveyjp said:

If you can't see how it is benefitting you it sounds like a personal issue.  That won't gain traction with anybody.  A similar example is a resident living in a ground floor flat complaining about having to pay towards lift maintenance.

Do you have a breakdown of the charges?

If you are paying money and what you are paying for isn't being done you then have a valid complaint which you can take up with the provider and then the Council.

If I lived in a ground floor flat and had to pay towards the lift maintenance, I'd go for a daily ride up and down in the lift to get my money's worth.

OldMusicGuy

Just as an FYI I was chair of a residents association where we took our management company to the Property Ombudsman twice over incorrect charging, overcharging and various other issues. It was really, really difficult to get anything done. We could only get the Ombudsman to address clear and explicit errors (eg being charged for a service on the gates on our development when there were no gates on our development!). We questioned the insurance charges, which were jacked up a lot in our case but these are very subjective and the management company had an assessor's report which stated the insurance costs were "reasonable" so we had no grounds for complaint. Same for things like audit fees, we were paying a lot for these and the audit continually missed incorrect charges and calculation of the management fee.

It's worth paying attention to these charges to make sure you are being charged for things that are actually allowed for, but challenging them takes a lot of time and effort. Like you said, you've learned your lesson for future purchases. It's something to be very aware of.