A company offering bungs to managing agents if they sign up for new gas and electricity supplies is being touted to … all the members of the Association of Residential Managing Agents!
An outfit called Energy Renewals is offering what it politely terms “incentive payments” of between £3,000 and £50,000 a year.
Major corporate clients – such as the larger, national managing agents – can do better still with payments of £50,000 to £250,000.
And the brilliant thing about it is that the leaseholders don’t have to be told anything about these payments and can be relied upon to keep paying up in blissful ignorance.
The incentives – which are rewards for spending other people’s money – can go straight into the pockets of managing agents, or freeholders.
The scope for these rake-offs is huge. Larger developments can spend £50,000 a year on communal electricity, and the heating bills will be considerable as well.
Leaseholders will be staggered to learn these “incentives” are being touted to ARMA members only a month after former civil servant Michelle Banks took over as the new chief executive promising a new ethical regime.
Banks, formerly of the Department of Communities and Local Government, is supposedly developing “an enhanced self-regulatory scheme” at the organisation.
It is doubly unfortunate that ARMA is promoting the “incentives” in the same month that the London Assembly issued a hard-hitting report on leasehold service charges, called Highly Charged, which condemned just these sort of kick-backs.
Energy Renewals is sponsoring ARMA’s annual conference in the autumn, and this sweetener will be cheering news for managing agents whose leaseholders have got wise to the great insurance swindle.
LKP has reported in the past that managing agents and freeholders can skim off up to 50 per cent in insurance commission – without leaseholders, who are presented with the bill, knowing anything about it.
Now along comes another incentive payment – or bribe, in common language – of which managing agents have no obligation to inform leaseholders and a huge vested interest to keep quiet.
In response to big money scandals uncovered at LVTs – including the £1 million pay-back to residents at St George’s Wharf, in Vauxhall – ARMA announced ARMA-Q, to provide ethical backbone for the trade body.
Outgoing chief executive David Hewett declared that this would be Banks’ first task at the organisation.
Allowing Energy Renewals to tout for business in this fashion is a depressing debut.
Related posts:
First task for ARMA’s ethical panel: examine ARMA itself
Stuff the leaseholders and win an iPad – from one of the sponsors of ARMA-Q
DCLG told ‘incentive to remain an honest managing agent gets less with each passing year’
ARMA-Q must expose managing agents’ ‘financial interests’
Managing agents owned by landlords must come clean … says leading managing agent
I would like to ask if you have any information on ‘ backdated bills’ and why they should exist?
I ask because on the ARMA site related to this under ‘Leaseholders let down by new energy code’ there is a comment ” Unexpected bills, often the result of energy companies misreading meters, can run into tens of thousands of pounds and are especially damaging to the leaseholders who must foot the bill through their service charge payments”
It would seem that ARMA is trying to blame energy companies but since taking over management of our properties we are fully aware how much our electricity charges should be and check the meter readings ourselves so would immediately pick up any discrepancies and challenge them. We also pay them straight away BEFORE committing this money to anything else!
Surely managing agents are paid to manage properties and electricity bills are as fundamental as insurance therefore there should not be any UNEXPECTED bills!
Under our previous managing agents ( members of ARMA ) we at one time received a threat of disconnection because unbeknown to us our electricity bills for the communal area had not been paid for 2 years!! I personally paid this amount immediately and deducted it from my service charge but when we took over management there were again red electricity bills awaiting payment. I wonder then if it is common practice NOT to pay electricity bills for whatever reason?