Brady Solicitors recently had a managing agent instruct them to recover substantial service charge arrears on their behalf for a property in Bristol, some of which had been owed for nearly 10 years.
Having failed to receive any payments from the leaseholder since 2014, the managing agent felt that they had exhausted all their options, and therefore weren’t confident in being able to recover the arrears. Additionally, as some of the arears were very old, the client was unsure on how far back they could recover arrears (more information on which can be found in our blog here). However, as the arrears had continually increased to such a substantial amount, they were leaving a significant shortfall in their service charge budget, which was impacting their ability to carry out necessary maintenance work on the property and deliver the contracted services to leaseholders.
Bradys’ approach
Following instruction from the client, Bradys began by sending the leaseholder a Letter before Action, which was not responded to and led to court proceedings being issued to obtain a judgement in default. In addition to the leaseholder communications, the mortgage lender for the property was also kept up to date on proceedings, so they had the opportunity to step in at any stage should they wish to do so.
With the leaseholder remaining unresponsive, even following possession notices, the mortgage lender decided to step in to stop the repossession. As specialist solicitors, with extensive experience in cases such as these, Bradys were not only able to get the mortgage lender to cover the leaseholder’s outstanding arrears in full, they also covered all of the costs associated with recovering them. This ultimately left the client with nothing to pay and their service charge budget back to full strength.
Client feedback
When asked about their experience working with Bradys, the client stated:
“Working with Brady Solicitors was easy. We hadn’t been able to recover service charge arrears from one leaseholder for many years, with numerous people getting involved to try and recover them. It was brilliant when the funds came through within only months of instructing Bradys.”
