With the recent publicity on TheTruthAboutSolitaire about Solitaire Property Management closing many of it’s regional offices, we surprisingly received the following e-mail this morning from Lee Middleburgh of Solitaire Property Management / Peverel Group: Dear Sir My colleague Andrew Billson, Managing Director (Operations) of Solitaire, commenced a customer communication programme a few weeks ago with a letter (to accompany the issue of March year end accounts) advising of important changes and improvements that are being implemented across Solitaire. One of the first is the introduction of a dedicated customer services team to resolve your [...]

Is Solitaire Property Management undergoing a cost cutting excercise at present? We’ve had many messages from residents, advising that they haven’t heard from their Site Managers and that offices are closing pretty much every week. The latest office to close is apparently the Southampton one, which leads us onto the fact that, this becomes possibly the 4th or 5th office to close in the last 8 months. Something is obviously not quite right, either that Peverel are cost cutting!  If you know of other offices closing please feel [...]

Those of you that wish to view the BBC Watchdog Broadcast on Property Management Companies can view it on the Watchdog ‘Blog’ pages at the following link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2009/03/property_mismanagement.html Please continue to send your experiences through to me and I will endeavour to submit something to Watchdog on Monday.  It’ll give me plenty of chance to put things together over the weekend. Thank you to those who have sent me your stories.  Remember – YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Share this:FacebookRedditStumbleUponDiggEmail

As always – thank you for all of the contributions that everyone is making on TheTruthAboutSolitaire. I have yet another request for information, except this time it’s not a visual request for photo’s and video’s, it is one for information. Those that kindly provided information for the Report that we produced in January detailed items such as cost increases, problems you are experiencing and how long you have had to suffer. We are collating more information following the recent broadcast by the BBC Watchdog program [...]

Thanks to Cliff for posting the iPlayer information about the Watchdog program from last Thursday that touched on Management Companies. For those of you that want to view the program visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jf7l9 Move the scroll bar to 9mins 54secs for the start of the Property Management Company section. Nicky Campbell ends the piece with the comment of “If you are having problems with your Management Company, get in touch” – so please, please if you haven’t already done so – now’s the time to act and [...]

We’ve received confirmation from a resident that is managed by Solitaire’s Leicester office, that it will be closing at the end of this week. A copy of the correspondence is below: I’ve been in constant touch with our local office recently (Leicester office) about mischarges to our accounts – what a nightmare, they’ve charged us for court costs and interest when they’ve failed to pay the invoices, unbelieveable! Anyway, I had an e-mail from the Regional Manager on Friday who made a passing comment that [...]

It’s been brought to my attention by another Solitaire Property Management customer who has recently received a letter asking if their property was rented out, and if so they have to pay a fee for a ‘Licence to Sublet’, plus pay a registration fee for the tenants. They owners have had the property for 6 years and this is the first time they have been requested to pay to rent their property. Therefore, I would like to hear from anyone who rent’s out a property [...]

Many people have mentioned the possibility of a Right to Manage Action, whereby you need 50% of the residents to agree to removing Solitaire and appointing management agents of your choice. I would like to know more information from those of you who are in the process of this or are toying with the idea how you went about it. I’m interested to know whether any of you have Estates & Management as your landowners? Obviously there is a relationship between Estates & Management and [...]

We copied ARMA into our recent report so that they were aware of issues with Solitaire Property Management / Peverel Group. Today – almost two months later I have received a reply from them, although – it’s not exactly an informative response. Your email dated 19 January 2009 to info@arma.org.uk and the  “TruthaboutSolitaire” website was considered by our Practice  Committee at their last meeting. You will, we are sure, appreciate  that it is not only wholly inappropriate but impossible to respond to  any anonymous, unsubstantiated [...]

Yet another story that has been received from ANOTHER Solitaire Customer… As customers of Solitaire for 5.5 yrs, we are at our wit’s end. Only last Oct. (08) did we find out we were assigned a property manager. Last week, we have a new property manager….at no point was any of this communicated by a letter. We pay in excees of £1100 a year, not including ground rent, in a small market town in Cheshire. For comparison, this is double what we would pay where [...]