Freeholders / Managing company failure maintain the exterior

[Guest]

Hi there,

I live in a flat-block which is 40 years old, and I'm a leaseholder. There's a few freeholders who live in the building, but they've employed a management agency. Both the management agency in the last 4 years and the freeholders.. forever I guess.. have in my opinion been hugely negligent in their responsibility to maintain the property. The lease is 100% that they are ultimately responsible for it, but we need to pay for it. We've got a 50k bill for a new fire escape, which I've had it confirmed to me if 1.5k per year was spent on it to maintain it, it would be in near perfect condition. It's reasonable to extrapolate that if £500 every year (or 1.5k every 3 years) would have kept it in good enough condition that it wouldn't need a full replacement. It's roughly the same amount of money, but spread out over 40 years and shared with past and current leaseholders, which would have made more sense. Is there a case to get them to pay for some of this?

- Note: For a minimum of 4+ years, I'm sure the property is currently illegal to live in. Not only is the fire escape condemned, but fire reports have stated the stairwell isn't up to code,and therefore there's no safe route of exit which is illegal. They've known this for years. What can we do with this info?

They also want to charge another minimum of 50k for the exterior of the building, like window sills, brickwork, windows, and I'm not sure what else. Again, I imagine this is down to negligence of maintaining the building that suddenly overall it needs 100k+ to fix it. I think they need to stump up some of the cash themselves for mismanagement.

Let me know,
Thanks

[james_law]

What does it say in your agreement??

[Ccjissues]

Hey james_law I've just signed in, but I am the OP of this thread.

The contract stipulates they are responsible for maintaining it etc, we are responsible for paying it. So they have to organise everything,and when they say "you need to now pay for x" we have to. My argument is, there's done nothing for 4+ years, leading to higher costs. So they haven't maintained the building as per the agreement. So we're happy to do our end, and pay for it, but in a fair way that minimises our costs.