stevenage leaseholders online

I created Stevenage Leaseholders Online because people were coming to Breathing In from Google on a search for “Stevenage Homes management fees”.

Leaseholders are annoyed with Stevenage Homes for raising the management fees. Some are seeing a 500% increase.

My original thought was to provide space to air grievances, maybe organize a response. So I set up some Discussion Forums. The first time I have tried this. It should be interesting.

The next question is, “How should I publicize the site?” It is already sixith of a Google search on “Stevenage Leaseholder.” Breathing In is third on such a search.

But maybe I should try to reach out more.

I’m fairly happy with the site. But there’s always a play off when going live, between being timely and being perfect.

There’s at least one bug on the site. When your resize the browser (ie6 or ie7), the top menu does not resize properly. Annoying, but as I’m using a free theme, I can’t complain too much.

If you are having this problem my advice is switch to Firefox, or any other half decent modern browser!

Do drop by, say hello and have your say.

Notification for the new management fees arrived today. Actually it arrived yesterday, but I avoided opening it until today as I was in a good mood. I wanted to stay that way.

As expected the letter was a poke in the eye. The old management fee was £57, 000 based on 12.5 percent of services provided.

The new management fee will be £239, 730.This equates to a management overhead of over 52 percent, a truly remarkable figure.

No information is given on how the figures have been arrived at. Just a breakdown of where costs have occurred.

The letter seems full of spin. For example in the section entitled “Comments and observations received from leasholders,” is the comment:

I don’t see any justification to this proposed increase and do not agree with it.

Has the answer

In accordance with the terms of your lease, Stevenage Borough Council is entitled to recover its costs for service provided.

A classic straw man argument.

The actual questions most people will be asking are:

I think this is too high, can you justify it?

What can I do if I still disagree?

No answers to these questions.

Hits to this site are the highest recorded, many coming from Google to the Leaseholders Forums post. Comments have been left discussing what to do.

I have decided to set up an online forum so people looking for information or just wanting to vent can have their say. Maybe it will become a place to organize a response.

We still have the major works to pay for.

November forums are usually well attended. It’s just after the service charge bill goes out. It is usually full of pissed off leaseholders wanting to know why the bills are so much more than the estimates.

This year my bill was actually less than the estimate. Clever! That’s one way to keep people happy. Just as long as they don’t compare this years bill with one from five years ago.

As well as the usual complaints about anti-social behaviour etc, there were a couple of issues which will no doubt reappear in the future

One was Major Works. Stevenage Homes have a grant from central government to carry out a major works on the property they own. Leaseholders will have to pay a share of any work carried out to the block they live in This is causing many people problems. I will cover this in detail later.

We also looked again at the proposed new management fees. Tempers became frayed at the last meeting when we were told we are likely to face big increases.

Stevenage Homes gave a presentation on the methodology they are going to use to calculate the fees. It went down quite well. When they get back with the actual costs, I suspect things will become lively again.

Interesting figures from the meeting: Stevenage Homes manage 4082 flats, of which 1297 are leasehold (31.8%). This is much higher than I expected.

Out of the possible 1297 leaseholders, only between 20 and 40 attend the forums. Stevenage Homes are considering halting them as they are not a cost effective way of communicating. I thought maybe an on-line forum might be a suitable replacement.

I might even consider hosting one myself