28 April 2021
We want to make sure you know exactly where and how your money is spent taking care of your home. Having a property manager looking after the areas you share with your neighbours means you can sit back, relax and enjoy your home. We understand how important it is to have visibility of how your service charge is spent.
The Property Management Explained Series
We’ve created ‘Property Management Explained’, a series of videos and fact sheets to help you understand how we look after the communal areas you share with your neighbours.
In our second topic, we want to clarify what your service charge pays for. Watch the video below to find out more.
Your service charge, explained
Our job is to keep the areas you share with your neighbours safe, clean, comfortable and in great condition, which can often help to protect the value of your property.
While this varies between properties, your service charge usually pays for things like keeping your communal windows clean, lawns tidy and all the plants and flowers cared for, taking chores off your hands. Inside your building your service charge pays for the lighting, heating and cleaning of the communal areas. It also covers maintaining the mechanical equipment that keeps your development running smoothly including lift maintenance, water pumps, security gates, communal heating boilers and fire equipment.
Plus, we organise health, safety and fire risk assessments with suitable specialists to make sure your building is kept safe. Your service charge can also cover general maintenance and repairs, the insurance cover for your building if you’re a leaseholder, and the salaries of any onsite staff.
We’ll always be transparent about what’s been spent throughout the year, and will send you an itemised set of accounts for the annual spend so you can see exactly what’s been done and how much it all cost.
We’re always here to help
When you pay your service charge, a portion of the money goes towards our management fee. This covers the cost of us carrying out site inspections, our customer service and specialist teams working behind the scenes, and our procurement team arranging maintenance and repair work and negotiating competitive rates with suppliers.
We also take care of a wide range of regulatory and compliance activities to make sure the communal areas you share with your neighbours are safe.
