Challenging Residential
Service Charges

When you receive a service charge bill from your landlord, you don’t have to just accept whatever you’re being charged. Service charges are there to repay the landlord for the reasonable costs they have paid out to provide services to your property. What is appropriate and reasonable to charge you is determined by the terms of your lease and the relevant laws. And therein lie a lot of potential arguments.

If you’re unhappy with your service charge bill, and are considering how to challenge the service charges, there is some basic information you need which you can read about here.

If you wish to see what challenges The Service Charge Company has undertaken for others, see our Case Studies.

To contact us with your particular enquiry, please fill in the online Enquiry Form.

Our services

We provide the following professional services:

1. Advice, investigation and representation regarding costs charged.
2. Considering whether Landlords have complied with applicable statutes, for instance
   
   
   1. Has the Landlord consulted with you before undertaking major works?
   2. How quickly have costs been charged to you? (If not within 18 months then you may not be liable!).
   3. Importantly are the costs claimed from you reasonable?
   You can see some of the Tricks of the Trade that have been previously experienced.
3. Analysing how costs have been divided between properties to calculate the percentage cost charged to your property. This is particularly important where there is a commercial use within the building.
4. If appropriate, we can also appear before the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal (the arbiter on residential service charges) on your behalf.
5. We can consider whether exercising your ‘right to manage’ is likely to lead to better value in obtaining works and services for your building.
6. In certain instances, where appropriate, the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal can also appoint a Manager to run the property. In a recent Tribunal case Paul Koopman of The Service Charge Company was appointed as a Manager and Receiver for a Building that was previously poorly managed.

Our professional fees

We believe that our fees are competitive and have been set based on our experience and feedback from clients. We usually charge an hourly rate but will work to agreed caps of time engaged dependent upon the nature of the issues involved.