The Truth About Solitaire Property Management & Peverel Group Companies

The title to this post may seem a bit obscure, but whilst we have been putting our strategy for CALAFEX together, we couldn’t stop thinking about, when, how and why developers started to sell off the free hold and have property management companies responsible for the developments upkeep.

In the area that one of the admin’s lives, there are many small ‘niche’ developments, that are marked ‘private road’ and maintained by Peverel OM – which appears to have become the norm.

What happened to the day’s when a house was built and the owners purchased the freehold at the same time and the council were responsible for it? 

Why are Councils (after all they give the go-ahead) allowing developers to build on land, to sell of the freehold and appoint PMCs?

Why can’t developers build developments with public access, that isn’t via a private road and is the responsibility of the local council to look after. Obviously, we understand why flats / apartments require PMC’s – but that is a separate issue.

Homeowners are paying council tax for a reason and for them to be charged that, plus a PMC charge is unreasonable.

Some where along the line, it must have become the ‘norm’ for Councils to approve developments, on the proviso that they wouldn’t be responsible for it, until a later date.  By which time, the developer, freeholder, PMC have all profitted from this.

We need to get to the bottom of this fact, before the government start putting pressure on developers to build homes in the future, otherwise, the government are pretty much holding the gun to homeowners heads and saying, “here’s a home, to live in it, we want council tax and for you to pay hidden charges”

Money clearly talks and I’m sure this entry will cause a stir, but when you look at the bigger picture, it’s true.  This type of transaction is now the norm and it’s time for change!

There’s been an increase in the number of people that have gone RTM or in the process of removing Solitaire / Peverel / Consensus Business Group, property management companies.

Some have managed to remove them via RTM, others by requesting E&M (where applicable) replace Solitaire with their chosen property management company.

With this in mind and to get an idea of the number of developments that TheTruthAboutSolitaire has had a factor in helping remove them, feel free to post below your development / estate, to encourage others that it is possible.

From the information you provide, we’ll be creating a separate page on TheTruthAboutSolitaire listing the success stories.

Now, who want’s to go first?

On Monday, we asked the question as to whether TheTruthAboutSolitaire, should commence our campaign called ‘CALAFEX’ or ‘Campaign for Leasehold and Freehold Exploitation’.

Following many of your comments and messages of support, we are pleased to advise that this will be happening. We’ve put together a temporary web page, explaining what our aim is and how people can contact us to tell their side of the story.

Don’t panic, this won’t mean that TheTruthAboutSolitaire will not be updated! In fact, it’ll be the opposite. Many of the contributions from you all, will be published on CALAFEX and taking inspiration from CARLEX (Campaign Against Retirement Leasehold Exploitation) – we hope that we will gain even more support than TheTruthAboutSolitaire already has!

Whilst the CALAFEX website is setup, we’ll be publishing any comments we receive on TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

In commencing the ‘CALAFEX’ campaign, it will allow leaseholders and freeholders, who are being exploited by other ‘non Peverel / Consensus Business Group’ companies to air their views.

By doing so, we hope that CARLEX’s fight for the Retirement sector and our CALAFEX campaign – will result in the Property Management / Service industry, being sorted out for once and for all.

It’ll also hopefully make MP’s and the Government take notice that these campaigns are running for a reason – which will give more weight to our No.10 Petition.

CARLEX are currently promoting the No.10 Petition and we should see support for this grow in the next few weeks, at the time of writing this post, we were up to 829 signatures!

We Now Need Your Help

We want CALAFEX to have all the necessary information that is available for residents to easily access and understand, what options are available to them, when trying to replace a property management company.

Therefore, if you are reading this from a development that has recently replaced a Property Management Company – (that’s any of them!) – we’d really appreciate it, if you can detail how you went about doing it and what was involved.

We want to have an encyclopedia of information, so that people haven’t got to search the web for different info as it’ll be in one place.

In addition to this, we also want to hear from you if you can recommend a reputable property management company that you have been impressed with – afterall, we know that there are good one’s out there, it’s just a matter of finding them.

Finally, we are looking for a web designer, who would be interested in supporting our campaign and helping us to produce a professional and corporate WordPress theme, that will reflect the CALAFEX campaign. We have our ‘logo’ and the ‘brand identity’, but need a bit more help in turning that into a ‘product’. If that’s you, please contact us.

We are determined to succeed and realise that CALAFEX is going to be a lot of work, but it will only be successfuly if we have everyone’s support and backing.

Please e-mail any info to the usual address, that can be found within the ‘Contact Us’ section of TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

Here’s to the future!!

There’s been lots of lively debates going on recently in regards to Right To Manage and LVT’s, which demonstrates, that finally, residents are starting to fight back against Solitaire / Peverel.

This has co-incided with a homeowner, who had managed to replace Solitaire Property Management and appoint their own chosen local PMC for their development, without going RTM or LVT.

They’ve told us that despite the ‘handover’ taking place last year, the new PMC are still yet to receive all the correct paperwork from Solitaire (electric bills, water bills, etc).  What was of particular interest was the fact that the new PMC is unable to source insurance for the development, due to Estates & Management informing the new PMC – that they will be responsible for it. 

The figures that the new PMC have had to budget for are scandalous and once again would suggest, that E&M / Consensus Business Group, may possibly be looking to source the insurance through another of their companies, to profit?

The cost of the insurance premiums that Solitaire / Peverel take out on estates, is a hot-topic of itself and is one that is being reviewed / investigated by the FSA.

Apart from the above, the new PMC has raised doubts in regards to the percentages that residents were contributing towards the management fee.  In some of the schedules, despite some properties being identical, they weren’t paying a penny and others paying almost double! 

From what we understand, based on the Solitaire / Peverel set of accounts, ‘Schedule 1′ – is what all residents should be contributing to equally, as this includes the road / parking spaces / landscape.  Therefore, if you have 30 properties, each property should pay 3% of the total of ‘Schedule 1′.

‘Schedule 2′ is usually for communal areas, such as flats that have access via a stairwell.  Subject to the number of properties that have this access e.g. 10 properties, each would be paying 10% of the ‘Shedule 2′ total fee.

‘Schedule 3′ – we have found normally relates to properties such as coach houses and town houses that have a car port / garage.  This covers the cost of insuring the garage separately and maintenance costs.  Therefore, again, if you have 20 properties with garages, each would be paying 5% of Shedule 3.

As an example, we have put the following together based on an estate with 30 properties (10 flats / 20 houses):-

We recommend that those of you that have received the ‘Yearly Accounts’ view the breakdown of the percentages that each property contributes to, and ensure it matches your lease, because we feel the above goes to demonstrate that, information is clearly wrong and despite residents knowing this and complaining, Solitaire were / are never prepared to find out the facts! 

Another piece of information that came as a massive surprise was, that one of the properties at the estate in question owed over £2,500 in management charges dating back to 2007, which was still outstanding.  We were shocked by this, considering the fact that Solitaire issue the ‘debt collection / bailiff threats’ to force people to pay, when this was a prime example of when this action should have been taken.

This is a vast amount of money for the management accounts to be down and unless the homeowner in question pays, then who loses out?  The residents, because if that £2,500 isn’t available to pay for services at the estate, the jobs don’t get completed, which then results in residents being angry that Solitaire aren’t providing a service, which is because there isn’t any money available to do the job. (Please Note:- TheTruthAboutSolitaire have actually defended Solitaire for once)

Taking some of the above into consideration, we came to the conclusion that Solitaire / Peverel, maybe increasing everyone else’s premiums, to cover the outstanding service charge payments of non-paying residents, without going the legal route with the non-payer and getting the money! 

Who knows? But it definitely would make sense why we are seeing drastic increases in maintenance fees?

Over to you all to discuss.

Regular TheTruthAboutSolitaire contributor ‘ArchAngel’ posted the following in reference to our campaign against Solitaire / Peverel.

You have done, and are doing, a fantastic job of highlighting everything that is wrong and unjust with this particular property management company. However as many of your regular subscibers and visitors know, Solitaire is but one of severel companies linked to Peverel and ultimately owned by Consenus Business Group. There are many other property management companies not related to CBG that may also require some attention.

Have you considered taking a more generic approach (like CARLEX) with the focus on the key issue (leasehold / property management exploitation)so that all concerned leaseholders can access your site and not just those who are currently under the yoke of Solitaire?

There are many, many leaseholders who are probably blissfully unaware that the freehold of their lovely new apartment block was recently sold by the developer of the site to a “company” (that was able to raise an massive bank loan) along with 27 other residential site freeholds across England and Wales? (Yes your freehold and the other 27 freehold sites are jointly now basically owned by the bank that issued the loan.)

BUT they will realise soon what has been going on and will begin to hunt around on the web for sites like this. BUT how will they find TTAS if they are not managed by Solitaire?

Some of you may remember that we mentioned late last year, that we were considering starting a campaign called ‘CALAFEX’ (Campaign Against Leasehold and Freehold Exploitation), which would not only aimed at Solitaire / Peverel, but across the board for all Leaseholder and Freehold homeowners, with properties managed by property agents.

Following ‘ArchAngels’ comments, we would like to ask whether anyone is in support of us initiating this campaign, so that as ArchAngel say’s – we follow the route that CARLEX has taken and are succeeding in their fight for retirement homeowners?

We already have the website domains: CALAFEX.co.uk and CALAFEX.com – so it would purely be a matter of collating information to go on it?

TheTruthAboutSolitaire, welcomes your comments and thoughts (plus any support you can offer, in setting about this motion!!)

Finally….

Thanks again for those that have signed and supported the No.10 Downing Street Petition.  The support of this continues to grow and we are currently at 800 supporters!

Thankyou once again and if you haven’t already done so, sign the petition at the following link:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/flatownerhelp/

We received an e-mail from an employee, who requested that we removed their name from a posting on TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

What was interesting to identify, was that the format of the employees e-mail address had changed, from that which had previously been listed on TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

Originally, Solitaire’s e-mail addresses were firstname.surname at solitairegroup.co.uk, but now, it appears their addresses are ‘firstnamesurname at solitairegroup.co.uk’.

Therefore, if you are trying to contact your property manager, why not try the above structure e-mail address and see if it gets through.

Don’t forget the website ‘ReadNotify.com’ – whereby you can send an e-mail and have confirmation that it has been read and had attachments open.

Some people may not be aware of the Residential Property Tribunal Service, which is the public body that can decide many Rent and Leasehold disputes. 

RPTS provide a fair, unbiased service that is used by thousands of Landlords, Tenants and Leaseholders every year.

Anyone can browse the ‘Archives’ for LVT’s against Peverel Group companies and a recent case, highlighted the commissions that were earned by Kingsborough Insurance, when arranging buildings insurance on behalf of Peverel Group companies.

The case in question, provided evidence dating back to 2002 and, it was proved that during this time, as the Insurance Premiums increased, as did Kingsborough’s commission.  In the early years, they were taking upto 30% commission, which slowly reduced over the next few years, until it hit 34% in 2008!

Needless to say, that for the 2008-2009 period, the commission dropped substantially to only 24%.

Once again, during the hearing ‘Oval Insurance Broking Ltd’ were mentioned.  A name that were are now all to familiar with, whereby Kingsborough, simply ring them to arrange the insurance cover and then charge ‘Peverel’ an increased premium.

Oval actually confirmed that they were only paid 4% by the insurers, which is what we would class as being a standard value for commission on these type of transactions. However, it demonstrated the greed of Kingsborough to make 34% on the same transaction.

Once again though, the resident in question managed to reduce their premiums by almost 50% when they obtained quotations for themselves.

It is this complaint, that all of us have, yet Peverel deny that there is any wrong doing.  So much for having residents interests at heart.

When will this type of wrong doing stop?

TTAS Improvements

We have made it easier for you to find ‘Archive’ posts, that we have published on TheTruthAboutSolitaire, by tweaking the ‘Archive Section’.

Rather than having a list of ‘Months’ for you to scroll through the many pages of postings, you can now easily select the posting you want from the drop down menu.

We hope that this makes your experience of TheTruthAboutSolitaire, more enjoyable and easier to use.

Following our post on Wednesday offering Solicitors and Property Management companies who specialise in Right to Manage / removal of Peverel - the opportunity to advertise on TheTruthAboutSolitaire, we are pleased that already a number of companies have contacted us.

We’d like to assure all visitors, that as part of the requirements of advertising on TheTruthAboutSolitaire, they must be able to demonstrate to us, that they have had successes in removing property management companies, who are associated with / part of Peverel Group or Consensus Business Group.

TheTruthAboutSolitaire take great pride in offering ‘facts’ and would not want to promote companies that are on par with Peverel Group companies.

A point was raised today, whereby as part of the ‘Google Adwords’ advertisements that are displayed on TheTruthAboutSolitaire, that ‘Peverel Retirement’ are listed.  Unfortunately, we are not in control of these ads and our only suggestion would be, for those users who see these links – click them, as it costs Peverel money, whilst earning us revenue that helps TheTruthAboutSolitaire to develop.

New Identity Coming Soon

With the rebranding of many of the Peverel Group companies, we thought it would be time for us to finally get a ‘corporate’ image.

Therefore, in the coming week’s, you will start seeing improvements to TheTruthAboutSolitaire, in addition to a brand new fresh design for the site!  (we hope, pending design issues!)

In the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of our new ‘logo’ – that you can all publicise!!

We have been really pleased with many of your suggestions and hope that we can integrate many of them into the revamp.

If there’s anything we’ve missed or you want added to the current site, let us know – ASAP, by posting on this entry.

Prospective Advertisers

If there are any companies that would like to advertise on TheTruthAboutSolitaire, please contact us for a copy of our Media Pack.

It’s clear to see that at the moment ‘Right to Manage’ (RTM) and ”Leasehold Value Tribunal’ (LVT) are hot subjects when it comes to companies associated with Solitaire / Peverel Property Management.

However, many of us aren’t too sure what to do and how to go about undertaking them. 

Our ‘Essential Guide’ does offer advice on these subjects, but we feel it’s time that we gave the opportunity to some of the hundreds of solicitors who offer RTM Services / or companies that deal with the whole process, the chance to engage with a captive audience and promote their services, to visitors of TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

We know from our website statistics, that Residential Property Specialist Solicitors - are visiting TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

Therefore, for a minimal donation to TheTruthAboutSolitaire, we are giving them the opportunity to be listed on a ‘directory’ page, for you to list the specialist services that you offer (with contact details) so that we can direct visitors to you, to help those that want to go Right To Manage.

TheTruthAboutSolitaire attracts on average, over 6000 visitors a month and would be the perfect platform for any company willing to help residents with Right to Manage or tender to replace any of the Peverel Property Management companies.

We would be looking for ‘law firms’ or ‘property management companies’ that have good success rates and experience in the removal of Peverel Group / Consensus Business Group, property management companies

Interested?

E-Mail us at the following link: Directory Advertising

We are also offering companies the opportunity of a  ’Premium Sponsored Link’ – which are listed at the top of every page, with a link to your website.

‘Premium Sponsored Links’ are available for rental on a weekly basis and if you are interested in this opportunity, feel free to e-mail us via the following Banner Ads Email link for pricing.

TheTruthAboutSolitaire is dedicated to ensuring that residents are offered the opportunity to be rid of the monoply that is the Peverel Group of property management companies.

Some of you may have noticed that we have made a few changes to TheTruthAboutSolitaire.

We are in the process of ‘tweaking’ the site and tailoring it to now not only be focused on ‘Solitaire and Peverel’ – but aimed at ALL Peverel Group and Consensus Business Group Companies.

So, Peverel – if you’re reading this, we are determined to highlight ALL of your FLAWS and fight for residents rights!

Further improvements will be being made and we apologise in advice for any technical difficulties that we create!