All we can do is sympathise and hope you can live with it and put it down to experience.
Better luck next time; lets hope they continue to underspend so that all you're stuck with is the two and a half grand management, admin and accounting fee and the sinking fund contribution. I see from the budget that they anticipated spending twice that, so presumably your service charge will be adjusted down for the underspend on the actuals? That's what my Local Authority Freeholder does. But then, they ain't profit-driven capitalists, lol
As regards...
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... 3) I was told when buying the house there would be a service charge but wasnt told what it was for at first
Originally posted by micky007
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... that too is unfortunate, but at best, just means you've learned lessons about house-buying. Including not to trust solicitors to ask the right questions. Although to be fair, they often only ask for the past three years' Service Charge accounts, which didn't exist as you were buying a new build. I hope you didn't use the solicitor recommended by the Sales office; but if you did, that too would be a lesson learned.
I've walked away from leasehold purchases in the past if Service Charges have not been completely transparent; including asking my own questions (direct or via the Solicitor).
Hope you can live with it? You're right to think that it's not fair, but I fear that a Complaint to your Solicitor (because they failed to brief you properly) would not succeed in terms of a result of financial redress .
You could look at
https://www.lease-advice.org/advice-guide/service-charges-other-issues/
and consider if you could get all the other leaseholders on board in a Tribunal challenge of the charges' "reasonableness"... But I don't know what your chances would be, since, as the web guidance says at paragraph 2.8 -
- "leaseholders have a right to ask the Tribunal whether a charge, or a proposed charge, is reasonable; however, there is no statutory definition of what is reasonable;. "