The Cosy World of the Complaint Free Arms Length Management Organisations ALMOs

LettingFocus is sceptical of Arms Length Management Organisations and questions their complaints reporting systems, their willingness to change and the degree to which they are open to criticism

Those of you who follow this blog column will know my aversion to buying flats.

I actually have some flats in my portfolio – sometimes they can work out as good buys – but most of my let properties are houses not flats.

One of the main reasons I prefer houses has a lot to do with irritations caused by neighbours. In badly built flats, noise from neighbours is far more of a problem than it is in houses – and where you have a shared communal hallway or parking area the problems of other people’s mess and odd habits tends to confront you on a daily basis.

Would-be private landlords who think that all this won’t affect them are living under a false illusion. The fact is that if your tenant is annoyed by neighbours they will tell you and it then does tend to become your problem too, especially if good tenants end up leaving because of it.

And don’t think bad neighbours are something unique to rough parts of town or poor dwellings. I have witnessed some of the nastiest, most difficult neighbours in the most posh up-market blocks of flats. Often some of the worst neighbours can be the Little Hitlers who are leaseholders who have bought out the freehold of an up-market flat and are running the management company of an owner managed block. (I’m generally a fan of right to buy freehold and leaseholders taking control, but it works best in low rise blocks).

ALMO

Talking of things to do with leasehold, I am a leaseholder in a low rise estate where the council hived off its management to what’s called an Arms Length Management Company or ALMO. This ALMO looks after all my local authority’s property in the borough. I also own another four freehold houses in the same borough where the same ALMO is manager of the estate grounds around the houses (many of the houses are ex-local authority and still lived in by council tenants).

Over the last 8 years, as a customer, I have experienced a number of examples of poor service from this ALMO and I have been very critical of their standards (though have not criticised them publicly).

In particular, I have frequently questioned their complaint handling statistics – which I believe are nonsensical and (based on my own experience at least) are probably biased by a tendency to close complaints before the problem is really dealt with.

Board Director of an ALMO

Recently, they had a vacancy on their board.

So, I thought I would apply.

After all, as author of a fairly successful property book and as someone who has bags of experience of the ALMOs’ service standards at first hand, I thought they would welcome my application.

Plus, I have an eye on furthering the part of my consultancy which involves helping the local authorities / housing associations to understand the private rented sector.

So I figured that being on a board like this would help make me one of the “public sector gang”.  (Most of LettingFocus’s consultancy work with organisations is with commerical organisations where I don’t have to plough through ludicrous, opaque and frankly weird (and possibly fixed) tender processes so beloved of the UK’s councils).

Unfortunately this ALMO’s odd, antiquated rules say that as a non resident leaseholder, I am not eligible to be a board member. So, that means all landlords are effectively barred.

We’ll Let You Know

I suggested they could perhaps review their rules.

They said they would have a think about it.

But I have not heard back from them.

Probably, they would not like someone from outside the public sector “milieu” to come in and suggest changes – especially someone like me who is an activist leaseholder and already known to them as a critic of what they do.

I’m not surprised, because from all that I’ve seen and read about it, the ALMOs are a bit of cosy, closed shop, lacking in any real competitive pressures, where not much ever really happens and scrutiny is taken about as seriously as their own rather laughable complaint handling statistics.

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