RTM managing the building themselves

Foxylady7170

Hello, 
As a Director of a RTM of 23 flats and frustrated by the MA we are considering managing the building ourselves. What are the major things we need to take into consideration?
We've already negotiated our own companies to provide services cheaper than MA eg our own accountant, our own broker for building's insurance and a new contract for fire safety including survey. We are EICR compliant for 5 years. We have a secured a gang of competent builders, electricians and decorators to provide repairs.
Any and all advice welcome especially from RTM who have taken this step. 

DullGreyGuy

Foxylady7170 said:

Hello, 
As a Director of a RTM of 23 flats and frustrated by the MA we are considering managing the building ourselves. What are the major things we need to take into consideration?
We've already negotiated our own companies to provide services cheaper than MA eg our own accountant, our own broker for building's insurance and a new contract for fire safety including survey. We are EICR compliant for 5 years. We have a secured a gang of competent builders, electricians and decorators to provide repairs.
Any and all advice welcome especially from RTM who have taken this step. 

Depends on how you and neighbours get on, who's going to field the call at 2am when the roof comes off and rain starts pouring in. Who deals with all the letters of complain the one obnoxious tenant keeps writing about everyone else? 

Its doable, but our last place was a share of freehold (not all leaseholders participated) who initially tried to self manage but then appointed an agency because it was too much time/effort for the voluntary staff to do with c175 leaseholders not all of which were freeholders. 

MichelleUK

Foxylady7170 said:

Hello, 
As a Director of a RTM of 23 flats and frustrated by the MA we are considering managing the building ourselves. What are the major things we need to take into consideration?
We've already negotiated our own companies to provide services cheaper than MA eg our own accountant, our own broker for building's insurance and a new contract for fire safety including survey. We are EICR compliant for 5 years. We have a secured a gang of competent builders, electricians and decorators to provide repairs.
Any and all advice welcome especially from RTM who have taken this step. 

Do not under estimate how hard it might be to get people to pay their service charges. Having a managing agent ‘in between’ the directors and your neighbours adds a certain gravitas to the whole collection process. Once it effectively becomes neighbours asking other neighbours to pay up, it definitely gets harder….how comfortable will it be having to threaten further action or being faced with requests for extra time to pay, sob stories etc?

Also, check that your accountant is experienced in service charges. I am an accountant and when I took on the accounting for our RMC, I was quite shocked at how specialist it was. Make sure that they actually read the leases to check that they are doing it correctly, rather than how they think it should be done.

When I took over the accounting from the developers, their old accountant had treated service charges like a ‘big bucket’ and had made no effort to keep separate service charge accounts for each property, changed year ends several times, missed costs that had not been charged over from the developer’s etc.