Financial protection and compliance
We recognise the importance of protecting both client funds and residents’ interests.
Austin Rees maintains professional indemnity insurance and client money protection arrangements, giving clients additional confidence that their property and finances are managed responsibly and securely.
Our team works carefully to ensure all management activities comply with:
- Lease obligations
- Property legislation
- Health and safety requirements
- Industry codes of practice
Professional Service Charge Management
Clear and transparent financial management is essential for maintaining trust between leaseholders, directors and managing agents.
We work with our clients to produce an annual expenditure budget before the start of each financial year to calculate service and reserve charges and ensure that charges are set correctly. This is a good opportunity to look at all costs and identify where savings might be made and ensure that there are no nasty surprises for leaseholders.
We serve appropriate Notices and issue demands in accordance with the terms of the lease and relevant legislation for the collection of service charges and, if appropriate, ground rent.
We manage many buildings with complicated service charge provisions (eg charging in advance, in arrears and with partial clawback provisions) and our accounts team are experienced in dealing with all these different situations.
We set up and manage designated bank accounts for each building. Our clients’ accounts are with Barclays Bank and do not incur bank charges. All interest is credited to the properties. Where large sums are being collected for future projects we use Money Market Funds to obtain higher rates of interest.
Because we are Regulated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) our accounting procedures have a great deal of transparency while maintaining security. All of our clients’ accounts are reconciled every month
We have strong systems in place for the collection of service charge and ground rent arrears. Where necessary and with our client’s consent, solicitors or debt recovery agents are instructed in the collection of unpaid service charges. We do not charge additional fees to the service charge account for the collection of arrears – any fees are charged directly to the debt.
We liaise closely with accountants to produce annual service charge accounts. These must be produced and circulated to leaseholders in accordance with individual leases.