Eagerstates and CCJ

TheFatrix

Hi,

I'm looking to get some advise around our current situation, short version is that we have a leasehold flat in a building of 9 where Eagerstates took over as the management company around two years after we got the flat. They also proceeded to purchase the freehold of the building.

They proceeded to increase the maintenance fees and anything they could think to charge for, including work that they didn't actually do. They also wouldn't meet the legal requirements set out in the lease, such as providing copies of the overall building insurance when asked as they'd increased the cost 1000% and passed it down to all the lease holders of the flats. When we question this and asked for copies they just kept stalling, eventually the did send some documents over but nothing made sense, it looked more like they'd set up policies for a month or a couple of weeks at a time but none of the documents seemed to relate to the building itself by address.

So all the leaseholders to the flats in the building got together to form a RTM to take over the management of the building to stop them charging such unreasonable costs, after some struggles and resistance from Eagerstates we got the RTM, this didn't stop Eagerstates still attempting to charge for a full years maintenance cost even though the RTM took over 6 months into the year.

The individual flats agreed to deal with their maintenance fees individually so from our side we decided to pay for the ground rent as this was required as part of the agreement in the lease but we would contest the rest of the charges via the First-Tier Tribunal (FTT) process.

Unfortunately Eagerstates beat us to the punch and applied for a CCJ against us for the outstanding balance, this blocked our application for the Tribunal process. We submitted our CCJ defence on the grounds that the CCJ should be set aside as it wasn't the right process to contest the unreasonable fee's that had been charged and the FTT process would be the correct way to go. We also stated in our defence that Eagerstates refuse to provide an itemized breakdown of the costs they say are owed as part of their CCJ application.

After three months our defence was rejected, so we'd assumed that the next step would be we'd get a date for a court hearing and we prepared for that but we heard nothing for another three months, then we saw that the CCJ claim had been "Stayed" but we'd had no communication as to the reason for this.

So after eight months CCJ claim had the stay lifted and reapplied a couple of times over the course of three months, during this time we had no communication about the claim for the county court or the applicants solicitors.

Then at the beginning of this month we get a letter from the County Court stating that the judgement was issued against us as we had not responded to the claim which we don't really understand as we haven't received an communication that we were required to respond to anything, as stated above we were awaiting a court date for the hearing to go though everything in front of a judge as we believe that they would agree that a CCJ wasn't needed in our case.

We managed to get a contact number for speaking to someone at the court about the judgement issued and unfortunately they were not very helpful, all they said was they had sent out letters via the post many times and as we'd received the judgment letter they didn't see any reason why we didn't receive the other letters they had supposedly sent.

We plan to appeal the judgement via the appropriate process, but this will obviously take time.

Any advice or previous experience anyone has had would be appreciated 

chanz4

Get appeal in quick before they escalate to high court