Today see’s the final instalment of our Review of the Year and we cover events that took place during October and December.

We also publish details of a new TTAS initiative, whereby we hope to help residents purchase the freehold of their development when they are offered the opportunity by the developers.

October

Fatal fire at Peverel Retirement development

October started on a very sad note, when we were informed of a fatal fire at a Peverel Retirement development called “Gibson Court” in Hinchley Wood that resulted in a resident losing their life.

The story would take centre stage throughout October, as residents and their families would get in touch to advise of issues they were facing.

Other retirement property owners would express concerns towards their safety, because they’d start reporting Health & Safety issues to us such as blocked fire exits, emergency lights not working and many others.

There were also worries about Peverel’s fire safety policy for residents in terms of what to do when fire alarms go off. They advise residents to ‘stay-put’ until further notice, which is fine providing you’re advised of the ‘further notice’ sooner, rather than later.

To date, investigations in to the cause of the Gibson Court fire continue and there are many rumours as to the cause – but due to these investigations we’re unable to comment.

Property managers would become disgruntled

Peverel / OM Property Management took a new approach to dealing with TTAS and started to flex their muscles, by demanding that when employees were mentioned in posts or comments that they had a duty to protect employees and wanted names removed.

Our privacy policy states that when requested, we’ll remove names and therefore we abided to these demands.

However, we’d then go on to receive correspondence from residents that would give us fair reason to name and shame under performing property managers.

This is because we were in receipt of enough evidence to demonstrate that certain managers were not doing their jobs properly – yet could get away with it and hide behind Peverel/OM Policy.

Who can you turn too?

You’re a resident with a grievances against your property management company and you want to take action against them, so what do you do?

Most will contact the company that appears to ‘regulate’ the industry e.g. ARMA, whilst others may decide to contact the property ombudsman and this is when ‘Ombudsmanship’ (if there ever was such a word) becomes ridiculous!

Why? Well we decided to contact ARMA (Association of Residential Managing Agents) in light of their recent emphasis on the fact that a condition of ARMA membership is that member also has a current registration with the Housing Ombudsman Service.

They kindly informed us that members have to belong to one of three Ombudsman groups, namely:

• Ombudsman Services: Property
• The Property Ombudsman Service
• Housing Ombudsman Service

Therefore, how on earth are we as leaseholders supposed to know where to turn when we have major grievances?

The whole system seems to be designed to cause the maximum confusion and afford the minimum effective protection to leaseholders.

It was interesting to note that ARMA themselves say that the Ombudsman Services: Property is their members preferred choice, yet it was the Housing Ombudsman Service who were invited to the ARMA conference to present a summary of complaints they had dealt with.

The TTAS Admin Team are of the opinion that the Housing Ombudsman Service is geared more towards social and sheltered (including retirement), which is slightly contradictory to what ARMA palmed us off with, because they said told us that ‘retirement housing’ is dealt with by the Association of Retirement Housing Managers.

ARMA also confirmed that the following Peverel companies are members of ARMA and are registered with Ombudsman Services: Property:

• OM Property Management
• Consort
• Pembertons
• Stonedale

Now the interesting part, because we thought that the Ombudsman Services: Property (or OS:P from now on) was a technical/surveyor type panel aligned with RICS – which Peverel are not members of and used to be called the ‘Surveyors Ombudsman’.

OM Property Managements website doesn’t include any direct references to OS:P apart from an old press release from April 2010 and a link.

Reference to the Ombudsman is made on page 6 of an 8 page Customer Complaints Procedure (which you first have to download) – but there is no mention of it on the complaints page? (tut tut).

It is only when you view the ‘Links page’ of their website does it state that you can complain to the OS:P if Peverel do not resolve your complaint within 8 weeks, and “provide a free and independent service”.

Ironically, TTAS have concrete evidence that this ‘free and independent service’ isn’t quite as simple as it seems. This is because residents can take a complaint to the Ombudsman, but it’s going to cost you £50+VAT fee for the case to be heard (this was the case the last time a resident contacted us having taken their complaint to the Ombudsman)

What happens next is the fact that, in the event the applicant (the leaseholder) is successful with their complaint, the respondent (the management company) are liable to reimburse the fee and if the respondent were to be successful, well that’s tough luck and the applicant has lost £50+VAT to try and fight the management company.

Making a complete mockery of ARMA members being associated to an Ombudsman!

Our view on this is that ARMA used to be the ones leaseholders complained to about the failings of the management company, however as soon as more and more complaints about Peverel were received, this sudden change of direction to ‘Ombudsman’ was implemented.

Now, returning to the other Ombudsman memberships that ARMA members should be associated too.

The Housing Ombudsman Service – is primarily for retirement and sheltered housing (if you are one of the 5,865 lucky ones).

The Property Ombudsman Service – is the ombudsman service that typically deals with estate / letting agent complaints.

Returning us to the fact of what the point is for ARMA stating that their members should be associated to one of three ombudsman, when only one is applicable to our needs?

The more and more that TTAS thinks about it, ARMA are pretty much useless and does absolutely nothing for leaseholders.

If anything, they purely want to be seen as a regulatory body that many thousands of managing agents are associated with and are paying the privilege to have ‘ARMA’ on their business cards and website.

ARMA are the Peverel of the ‘regulatory bodies’ – whereby they are only interested in making sure that they and their ‘buddies’ are all right and who gives a stuff about the others!

It would appear that money talks at the end of the day and the more brown envelopes handed out, the better you’ll be treated and we still maintain this opinion!

November

Barratt Homes launch Property Management Co

We discovered that Andrew Billson (former MD of Peverel) was leaving Peverel / OM Property Management to head up Barratt Homes’ new Property Management Division.

This is the same Barratt Homes who are one of the biggest housebuilders in the UK and has ONE of the biggest contracts with Peverel.

This decision will have a major impact on Peverel’s business, BUT the problems for residents don’t end their, due to Mr Billson being in charge of this side of the business.

In fact, we felt that this would be detrimental to all residents and potential buyers of Barratt Home properties because at present, they can distance their brand from the problem e.g. Peverel at Barratt developments.

However, they now face the prospect of being named and shamed for under performing, which could and more likely seriously damage the Barratt brand.

We continue to keep an eye on this and should we hear anything of interest, TTAS will be the first to report on it.

Depreciating property values, thanks to Peverel

Trying to sell your property in the current financial climate is always going to be a problem, but it’ll be even harder for those that are trying to sell properties that are “managed” by Peverel / OM Property Management related companies.

Despite resident grievances – there will always be potential buyers that are oblivious to these facts and could be tempted to bag a “bargain” with depreciating property values.

This was the case when one TTAS contributor who doesn’t yet own a Peverel managed property contacted us to say that falling prices, were tempting them to buy Peverel properties and asked what they should do.

It’s always a difficult question to answer, because WE know the pitfalls of owning a Peverel property and what issues are associated with it, but for novices – many see the property as “cheap” and therefore are tempted to proceed with the purchase, to later regret it.

We remain adamant that if you are contemplating buying a Peverel managed property that the best thing you can do is to not proceed with the purchase.

This may not be what sellers want to hear, but whilst Peverel remain on the scene we hope that it will inspire them to take action and rid them and their neighbours of them.

As we know that once this happens, you’ll be in a stronger position when it comes to selling your property.

New Director at Peverel

It can to fruition that Peverel Ltd (who are in administration) appointed Michael Kane O’Donnell to the board as Chairman.

Mr O’Donnell is a director of other companies namely, Ebbtide Partners Ltd, Mercury Equity Ltd and Helical Bar PLC.

He also described himself on his ‘LinkedIn’ page as “an investor and board level project manager with particular expertise in structuring and managing complex private company equity holdings and an outstanding track record in guiding challenging investments to successful realisation”.

To date, Mr O’Donnell has kept a very low profile – but we anticipate that his role is one of sourcing a potential buyer for the company.

Only time will tell whether this appointment was worthwhile, but we continue to monitor the situation.

December

Mis-selling by developers continues

TTAS undertook a spot of “market research” and called many new build developments throughout the UK to enquire about management / service charges should we proceed with purchasing a property.

We contacted developments being built by the leading developers including Barratt Homes, Crest Nicolson, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Redrow, Bellway and Bovis Homes.

Most of the site office sales staff avoided the question of who the management company would be and gave an initial “ball park” figure for yearly service charges, that were incredibly low.

This was enough proof that developers are mis-selling homes, because on a number of the developments we contacted, we knew that Peverel/OM were the appointed agent – yet the developers refused to admit to this.

If you’re are interested in reaquainting yourselves with this report click here for details

News on the Block Awards “Fixed”

Ten days before the News on the Block (NOTB) Awards took place, we predicted that Peverel / OM would win the “Customer Service Award”, despite our continued reporting of their customer service failings.

Therefore, it wasn’t a surprise when we found out that they had one that lead to the general consensus of these awards being “fixed”.

If you didn’t get the chance to read this article and are curious as to how we concluded that they were fixed, take a look at this link and read the article, plus comments to judge for yourselves.

Find a Friend got a lot easier

We made a request for residents to contact us with details of their developments, so that neighbouring developments could get in contact with eachother.

There was an overwhelming response and within two days we received details of over 500 developments.

With the publication of these developments, our sources acknowledged what we were attempting to do and then leaked a comprehensive list of developments to us, for publication.

That mean’t that our ‘Find a Friend’ listing included over 1000 developments.

Conclusion

We’ve reached the end of reviewing 2011 and we hope that it has brought back memories of stories that you may have forgotten about.

TTAS will continue to promote the issues that we as home owners are faced with and fight on behalf of all leaseholders and freeholders throughout the UK.

Others have mentioned that 2012 is going to be an interesting year and one that will hopefully see the demise of Peverel, but even if that doesn’t happen – we’ll continue to battle on all fronts.

There is lots still to come from TTAS and one such example is that we want to hear from home owners that have been given the opportunity to purchase the ‘freehold’ of your development.

You’ll be given around 30-45 days to respond to the opportunity by your developers and TTAS have sourced funding that we hope will allow us to purchase the freeholds on your behalf.

More details of this will be published in the coming weeks, but our intention is for TTAS to fund the purchase  and residents will then repay this funding to end up owning the freehold.

This will mean that you’ll no longer need to pay ground rent, whilst also being able  have full control over your managing agents.

Shock waves are probably being felt right now amongst Peverel and developers, because residents have a legal right to be offered the opportunity to own the freehold at a set price, which many are not aware of or understand and is why the developers are able to sell the freehold to Peverel related companies e.g. Proxima GR Properties Ltd / Estates & Management.

Happy New Year!!