When the Managing Agent Controls Everything and Everything Goes Wrong

spectrumthinker

This is my experience as a cautionary tale about the risks of owning a leasehold flat where lease enforcement and all communications are funnelled through the managing agent. This is a longer post because modern leasehold systems are anything but simple, and the detail matters.

TL;DR

The agent controlled whether lease enforcement occurred, yet failed to properly verify whether a breach of lease existed, and instead relied on an assumption that blocked enforcement and then pressured us into a settlement which preceded a serious mental health collapse and unavoidable sale of the flat.  

My advice is to document absolutely everything. If something goes wrong and you end up needing to sue the landlord or management company, you may discover gaps between what actually happened and what the managing agent later says happened.

2017

My wife and I took our first step onto the property ladder with a flat built in 2007: great location, spacious, a lease with an unambiguous carpet clause, promises of high standards and fairness, and a RICS-regulated senior property manager acting as intermediary for virtually everything.

Soon after moving in, we noticed a lot of noise seemingly from the upstairs neighbours, as if there was improper or no soundproofing on the floors. I waited to see if the noise would die down, but it never did. The neighbours became defensive regarding flooring and said they were compliant.

2018

I wrote to the agent to complain, given that tenants aren’t allowed to sue each other, but rather than treating it as a lease enforcement issue the agent deferred me to the local council’s Environmental Health — and when I escalated to the management company’s directors, they simply pointed me back to the agent.

2019

The noise is starting to mess with my head because it transmits in the whole of my flat, so I wrote to the agent and asked them plainly to enforce the lease’s soundproofing rules. They say they need proof of statutory noise nuisance and I tell them to notify the flat above mine to install carpets as per the lease.

2020

As the noise continued, I waited for that enforcement, mindful that COVID had started.

2021

However, the noise started to interfere with my focus and ability to rest, to the point doctors said the prolonged exposure had sensitized my nerves and that I had to get away for a while in order to recover. My wife was not having the same reaction I was.

Neighbour’s admission

We contact the neighbours again, raise the medical issue, and politely ask them to comply with the lease. They again say they’re compliant because they’re using the flooring the Landlord installed, so they don’t have to do anything.

I notify the agent of this critical admission but they stonewall.

Solicitor involvement

We get a solicitor. I learn I can’t sue the agent directly because we have no contract, so we send a letter to the neighbours in the hope that nudge will compel them to act.

The solicitor explained they have a duty to cover the floor with soundproofing, that the noise has a serious effect on me personally and I had to relocate for the time being.

That only made things worse because they now felt threatened by us.

As the solicitor advised getting the Landlord involved, we write to them to say their management is allowing tenants to skip mandatory obligations for the last three years. No reply followed.

Internal complaint

We then raise internal complaints with the agent’s corporate directors only to be told by the agent the directors are on holiday.

I become desperate because I wanted to be at home with my family and pets, not sitting alone in rented accommodation, so my wife and I call and email the agent repeatedly.

Enforcement gatekeeping

The agent finally says what they need to enforce the lease. Each condition dissolved into the next, until the agent declared themselves satisfied without ever having tested anything.

First, they say a finding of statutory nuisance from the local council’s Environmental Health is paramount. We jump that hoop and report back that Environmental Health declined jurisdiction and won’t investigate if a lack of carpets is causing noise issues.

Then they say they need funding for an expert to come in and test the floor in order to assess if it’s compliant or not. We find a qualified expert, tell the Agent we’ll cover the costs, only to hear we need consent from the neighbours to be tested.

Finally, the agent said they had satisfied themselves that the landlord-installed flooring was compliant, so there’s nothing they can do about it because the flooring hadn’t changed.

Health impact

At this point I was nervously depleted and struggling to maintain focus at work.

Although I was away from the noise itself, the ongoing dispute meant that hearing thumping noises — even outside the flat — triggered ear ringing, heightened skin sensitivity, and waves of anxiety, interfering with my attempts to gradually desensitise.

The NHS added me to the waiting list for intensive mental health therapy.

Mediation

The agent acknowledges my personal struggles with noise and proposes to mediate between us and the neighbours to find a compromise, as they claim the neighbours are worried about the cost of flooring works. I thought that’s sensible, and if I offer to pay half then maybe this nightmare can finally go away.

During the mediation, the agent took the position of neutral intermediary and we learn that no one managed to get a reply from the landlord.

Both we and the neighbours argue about facts and feelings, but we were unable to agree on whether the original flooring complied with the lease or not.  

At that point, the agent confirmed that the landlord-installed flooring was sufficient and there’s no comeback. I asked the agent to confirm that position with free expert testing.  

They flippantly dismissed the notion and I was suddenly without options to return home.   

Intimidation

As the discussion progressed, the tone of the meeting changed. The agent began interpreting the lease in a way that introduced costs for other flats if enforcement were pursued. I made it clear that my objective was simply to address the noise so that we could move on. I offered to provide floor covering for free but the neighbours refused a carpet runner and the agent said that such measures will not be effective anyway.  

Rather than engaging with that offer in good faith, both the agent and neighbours labelled me “tuned in” for having the sensory sensitivity I was having and further threatened us with social alienation for allegedly costing all flats an absolute fortune if one flat is found in breach.

My wife says she feels intimidated. I ask if they’re blackmailing us to drop the enforcement. The neighbours say they are the ones being blackmailed and being made an example of. The agent says it isn’t blackmail but ‘resolution’ and suddenly threatens us with a lease breach for ‘interfering’ with our neighbour’s quiet enjoyment.

The traumatic moment

By the end of the meeting, as the pressure built up, I found myself experiencing visual and emotional flashbacks to the only other time institutional authority pressured me into humiliation in front of peers. Every time the agent leaned on shame and blame mechanics, I felt disgusting.  

The neighbours issue an ultimatum: pay them or they will stir up all four blocks in the development after the meeting. Anger, resentment, fear and shame were competing inside of me. I couldn’t fight, flee or fawn so I froze like a deer in the headlights.

Outcome

The only route to check lease compliance became one we had to fund privately, after enforcement had effectively been abandoned. Continuing to pay rent elsewhere while still paying the mortgage on the flat was financially unsustainable, so we agreed to pay for their choice of floor covering. We felt humiliated.

The agent described this ‘settlement’ as fair and amicable. I had lost all confidence that the law, the lease, or even basic common sense were guiding the agent’s choices.

2022

We pay the expert to test the floor and advise on something that’s not carpet but still lease compliant. The tester determines the decibel readings amounted to a breach of lease and advises on materials. We get consent from the neighbours on materials and pay a tradesperson to install those. Even so, despite having free floor covering, the neighbours later tried to resurrect the dispute behind our backs. I felt unjustly targeted.

At that point my reality testing was so impaired that selling a nearly paid-off flat in a hurry felt like the only rational thing in order to avoid a repeat experience of bullying.  

By the end of 2022, after a stressful house moving process far away from that town, I remained stuck in hypervigilance while experiencing pain, fatigue, and runaway anxiety. I was also seeing the world as if from the bottom of a well and had fits of rage.

I get diagnosed with fibromyalgia, complex PTSD linked to the ADHD and Autism I never knew I had. I was told that fibromyalgia is a lifelong chronic pain condition with no cure that needs to be self-managed.

I couldn’t function, couldn’t work, and my wife was telling me I’m not there mentally.

2023

We instructed a solicitor and barrister to review if I have a claim against the block management for the nuisance and personal injury. I’m told in principle:

1. Environmental Health was a red herring and the wrong test for merits. The agent should have known better by virtue of their profession.
2. The agent always had the power to go and look at the neighbour’s flooring when a breach is alleged.
3. The mediation may not have been a mediation for multiple reasons regardless of what label the agent used.
4. The neighbours were very likely in breach for not covering the original floor.

A formal pre-action letter was sent to the landlord, management company and agent accusing the management company of fobbing off enforcement via their agent and for causing significant personal injury.

The agent replied on behalf of the block management, taking offence at the allegations, and said that they had done nothing wrong for the reason the landlord had fitted carpets or other adequate floor covering at sale in or around 2007 which, they said, remained in place in my neighbour’s flat.  

At my instruction the solicitor sent another letter to ask for the evidence they were relying on, and shared my barrister’s view that they are clearly in the wrong. No reply.

2024

I quickly burn through £20,000 on legal fees and send one more letter to ask for their internal documents. In reply they falsely claimed not to have received my solicitor’s second letter and refused document disclosure. That made litigation unavoidable.

I complained to the agent’s regulators, RICS and ARMA, about bullying and dishonesty, only to be told that they won’t investigate absent a court finding.

2025

With savings drying up, I continue unrepresented as a litigant in person against three defendants while dealing with the very injury I’m claiming for. The court fee is £10,000.

The Landlord’s position

The Landlord legal team says they delivered the block of flats with cement flooring and other fixtures and instructed tenants to cover their floors. Furthermore, the landlord claims no responsibility because enforcement was delegated to the management company and their agent.

Crucially, the Landlord’s defence directly contradicts the agent’s claim that floor covering and carpet was in place by default.

The Management Company’s position

The management company’s legal team concede the floor in my neighbour’s flat was the same the landlord installed. This stance is inconsistent with the earlier pre-action positions that carpets or some other covering existed.

In addition, they:

-       claimed I never indemnified their agent for the costs required to enforce;

-       said they instructed the agent to conduct an ‘informal’ mediation; and

-       adopted a “neither confirm nor deny” stance more commonly relied on by MI6.

The Agent’s lack of position

The agent’s legal team, appointed by their corporate parent, didn’t bother to file an actual defence to share their side of the story or disclose where they got their facts from. Instead, they say the whole claim is incoherent and should be struck out. They also argue they can’t be liable for an injury stemming from sensitivity (ADHD/Autism), and in any event, there is no contract between me and the agent to make them liable.  

Hindsight clarity

Crucially, it became clear we and the neighbours were talking past each other during the whole confrontation. Public records show the neighbours I complained about joined in 2014, the agent was contracted in 2015, and we purchased in 2017. None of us could have known what flooring was actually installed in 2007 without asking a firsthand source and the agent won’t name the source of the carpet fact.

Only the landlord, their documents, and original purchasers knew. The agent’s role was effectively to stand in the landlord’s shoes for enforcement purposes, yet their failures left them unaware of the basic facts needed to manage a block of flats.

Also, the management company’s description of ’informal’ regarding the mediation is a word their agent never used during recorded conversations. If the agent was actually instructed to act outside its lease enforcement role, I would have expected it to be clearly explained at the time, but no such disclaimer was given or implied. 

Because of the contradictions that have already emerged, I no longer feel able to accept the agent’s account without proof it’s not simply another late reconstruction unsupported by their internal documents which they continue to decline disclosure of.

2026

I disclose to the court the recorded phone call transcripts from 2021 to illustrate I did indemnify the agent for costs but they flip-flopped while we jumped through every hoop the agent asked for—the request for Environmental Health’s intervention, the need to follow a procedure for expert testing, the agreement to cover those costs, the agent’s acceptance, the new neighbour consent barrier, the escalation from uncertainty about flooring to absolute certainty, the persuasion it’s merely a neighbour conflict and the push into mediation—all of which the management company seems unaware of.

For the remainder of the trial the management company, and by extension the agent, are now caught with contradictions in court documents.

I also disclose to the court the medical report written by an independent expert based on my medical history and a review of the mediation recording itself. The expert identified coercive dynamics as the trigger for a life-changing injury, compounding the harm already caused by prolonged noise exposure and amplified by neurodivergence.  

The Law

Looking back, what the agent may not have appreciated — or chose to ignore — is that the lease operated within a strict legal framework known as mutual enforcement. It is the promise the landlord, the management company, and each tenant make to each other to follow the rules, the carpet clause being one of those rules.

Not all leases contain such provisions, and it is not something explained by solicitors at the time of purchase. I simply trusted that the system worked as it was designed to.

The key common law precedent I intend to rely on in court is Duval v 11-13 Randolph Crescent Ltd [2020]. It is a Supreme Court judgment which clarified that a landlord who makes a promise under a mutual enforcement scheme cannot do anything that would prevent them from carrying out enforcement. During the oral hearing, Lady Hale, then President of the Supreme Court, explained it this way:

“…well of course, there could be perfectly standard situations where the landlord either didn’t know or didn’t care if somebody hadn’t carpeted their flat, but of course the person underneath them would both know and care, and could draw this to the landlord’s attention and the landlord wouldn’t want to grant any licence to do that—or not to carpet—but might not have bothered to do anything about it had they not been required to do so by the tenant” 
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEc3BES205s&t=4648s

This is the novelty in my case. If the landlord is not allowed actively to permit tenants to breach the lease or not to carpet, is the agent, to whom the landlord transferred enforcement powers, held to the same standard? The precedent indicates that this must be the case; otherwise, the lease structure would make little commercial sense.

The reasoning is that any permission to dispense with carpeting amounts to the kind of licence contemplated by Lady Hale. The law is clear that if a landlord permits an alteration incompatible with the lease, such as allowing hard flooring instead of carpet, they forfeit the right to enforce the carpeting obligation — there’s no backtracking.

This is why landlords are careful about what they authorise, and my allegation is that the agent did not seem to care about this legal risk when telling the neighbours they did not need to cover their floors. I also think it would be perverse to expect tenants to police what licences or permissions the professional managing agent gives to others.

Public interest

The agent publicly claims to manage 200 blocks and is part of a larger group managing over 100,000 homes. Because of how our lease enforcement was mishandled and twisted into a neighbour dispute that spiralled out of control, I can no longer live in flats, sustain employment or enjoy life like I used to.

At that point I realised this wasn’t just about my flat anymore. This lease structure with intermediaries holding all the power exists across thousands of homes, and I can’t shake the feeling that other vulnerable leaseholders may be trapped in similar situations.

I even approached another RICS professional to ask whether this managing agent’s handling of the matter appeared negligent, but was told they could not comment on the conduct of another member.

That struck me as unusual. In most professions, if a builder, dentist or solicitor appears to have made a serious mistake, the client can usually seek an independent second opinion from someone in the same field. In leasehold systems, you cannot, so I felt I had little choice but to try to become my own expert and advocate.   

Furthermore, leaseholders have tremendous difficulty obtaining their agent’s internal documents. I have read many news articles about people spending tens of thousands litigating over suspected service charge misuse without resolution. I now find myself in the same position: asking the agent for their documents and being met with silence.

Closing

The entire modern leasehold system only works if the intermediary responsible for enforcement follows the rules and scrutinises the facts before taking a formal position.  

I believe the agent either negligently failed, or simply did not care, to verify the central question: whether the flooring I complained about was up to standard.  

Instead of deploying the powers the landlord had granted them, or trusting the lease when it said tenants have to cover the floors of their flat, they appeared to assume that any landlord-installed flooring or fixture must be sufficient — to the point of not even looking at the floor itself — while managing me out of enforcement with a ‘settlement’.

I still don’t know where the agent got the idea the flats were sold with carpeting, why they dismissed an independently funded test, or why they felt the need to place that amount of pressure on me when I was obviously struggling with my mental health.

If you reached this far, thank you for reading. It’s been a tremendous emotional and financial struggle and it’s still far from over, with trial looming over claims for loss of amenity, medical costs, relocation costs, and years of lost wages.  

Ironically, after relying on mediation during the dispute itself, the management company did not respond to my offer to mediate before proceedings were issued.

[Some text removed by Forum Team]

Disclaimer: This is my personal account of events. The matters described are subject to ongoing court proceedings and the defendants dispute aspects of this account.

Ayr_Rage

Not sure asking for crowdfunding donation is within the forum rules.

Rather than pursuing the issue like a dog with a bone and wasting such large sums of money I think you should've moved as soon as possible after the issue became apparent.

user1977

No, it's against the rules:

refrain from asking for money or sharing personal fundraisers as we can't police who is genuine or not, and doing so may also breach our rules on sharing personal information. This includes the posting of links to personal fundraising or crowdfunding pages, such as JustGiving.

Albermarle

Although congratulations on writing the longest post I have ever seen on any MSE forum !

TroubledTarts

I wonder if this is at all good for your health and finances progressing this as you have. Rather than just moving on and trying to get some enjoyment back into your life.

Remove that crowdfunding link otherwise the post may well get removed

RelievedSheff

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81994568#Comment_81994568

Fully agree.

I'm not sure that getting this far involved in a situation like this is good for anyone's mental health.

Just move and get on with your life. Lessons learned and find a more suitable property next time!

LightFlare

we see quite a few posts about excessive “noise” from upstairs flats

In my opinion, that’s the big downfall of that arrangement- it is not reasonable to expect zero noise and all noise is generally not deemed to be excessive

spectrumthinker

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81995278#Comment_81995278

I tried to move on and forget about it after I had relocated but the trauma and later fibro just wrecked me. Two attempts to go back into full time work failed. NHS said they don't treat somatic conditions.

Nothing I can do about but grind through the courts to get some acountability and raise awareness that property manager neglect and mistakes can have serious consequences for neurodivergent people.

They could have tried to settle the claim years ago but chose to double down and not admit any wrongdoing.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81995358#Comment_81995358

I never had problems in flats, but then I never lived below someone who didn't know they had to cover floors. This wasn't a case of they ripped out the carpets and installed laminate. In places they were using the builder's structural floor as is. I could hear thumps in my livingroom when they potted about in their kitchen and the walls vibrating in my bedroom when they washed their clothes.

P.S. My apologies for the crowdfunding link, didn't know it was against the rules.

lincroft1710

Nothing I can do about but grind through the courts to get some acountability and raise awareness that property manager neglect and mistakes can have serious consequences for neurodivergent people

"Grinding through" the courts simply wastes your money. You will just be seen by the court as a "vexatious litigant". Neglect and mistakes by property managers can affect all sorts of people not just those who are neurodivergent.

You have probably spent far more money in legal fees than the amounts you claim to have lost or had to pay due to the noise problem.

spectrumthinker

I think I understand where you’re coming from, and it’s a fair warning, but you’re making assumptions about the economics of the claim and my reasons for continuing it.

Before all this I was a senior software developer working in London, and the financial impact from losing years of work has been substantial. The medical position is still uncertain as to whether I’ll fully recover to work or be pain free.

When I say “grinding through the courts”, I mean the process itself is extremely slow. A simple application takes months to process, and since issuing proceedings around 8 months ago, we’ve only just moved beyond the very early procedural stages.

Ironically, that pace probably suits me nowadays because my cognitive processing and writing speed are nowhere near what they used to be. The fatigue afterwards also takes ages to go away.

I also don’t think pursuing a legally advised claim automatically makes someone vexatious. I was told the causation issues are more complex than a standard dispute, but not outside the ordinary scope of civil litigation.

We’ll probably just have to agree to disagree on whether property management repeated mishandling with serious consequences should simply be written off and forgotten.

lincroft1710

We’ll probably just have to agree to disagree on whether property management repeated mishandling with serious consequences should simply be written off and forgotten.

Your money, your choice.