Leaking roofs, dumped sofas and a lift that hasn’t worked for nine months - a description of a run-down council estate? No, a “luxury riverside residential estate” in Fulham, southwest London, where studio flats go for £250,000 and residents pay service charges of about £100 a month.

In an all too common scenario, this was a block managed by an organisation that failed to arrange even basic maintenance, charged residents thousands for getting keys cut (it ordered 2,000 instead of 200), didn’t pay the gardeners for a year, did not return leaseholders’ calls and cancelled the annual residents’ meeting - the one opportunity for homeowners to air their views.

“When I bought my flat in 2004, the building seemed all right, but things went downhill,” says Mark Fossick, 36, an IT web designer, who owns a one-bed flat in the development, Carrara Wharf. “There were broken lights and door handles in the common parts, which weren’t fixed, painting jobs needed doing and the gardens weren’t looked after, despite the fact that we were paying service charges for all this.

“I would ring the management company, but my requests to get something done were ignored. The lift was broken for so long, it became a problem for people trying to sell or rent their flats – who’s going to buy somewhere if they have to climb three flights of stairs?”

The situation became so bad that Fossick and his fellow residents borrowed ladders so they could fix external lights themselves and clubbed together to buy plants for the garden. “Cars were being parked on our front garden, turning it to mud,” he says. “We asked the managing company to put in bollards, but nothing happened. So myself and other residents dug the area over and planted flowers – it cost us hundreds of pounds, but we were fed up with looking at the mud and mess. We never got the money back.”

After complaints to the board of directors that represented the owners of the estate, the managing agents were replaced earlier this year. The building is now efficiently run – but residents have lost money and endured years of frustration. County Estate, the company that previously managed Carrara Wharf, declined to comment when contacted by The Sunday Times.

The profusion of such stories has prompted the creation of a working party, chaired by the president of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), to find ways of regulating the residential management sector. The 10-member committee, which met for the first time this month, will look into recurring problems such as inflated management costs and unnecessarily high premiums for leaseholders who are forced to take out buildings insurance via the freeholder.

“We are aiming for transparency,” says David Pilling, project manager at Rics and a member of the working group. “Do consumers know what they are paying for? Where is their money going? We have been hearing the same issues raised time and again over the past couple of years. What we want now is evidence and information from consumers and stakeholders.”

One man who knows where some of the money is going is Roger Southam, chairman of Chainbow, which manages residential blocks in London and the southeast, and has often been called in to take over poorly run properties, including Carrara Wharf.

“I’ve seen some appalling cases,” he says. “In one mixed-use block we took over this September, in Southend, Essex, the managing agents failed to charge the commercial leaseholder for six years, leaving residents to foot the bill for the whole block, paying £60,000 too much. It’s amazing how many homeowners are paying for expenses they should not be – and nobody is trying to help or educate them.”

In that case, Southam investigated the overpayment, with the result that the 52 residents have each had £1,153 refunded. “The problem is that anybody can set up a property management company,” he says. “What our industry needs is tight regulation.” He backs the Rics-chaired working party and has been lobbying the government to get all managing agents licensed.

David Hewett, chief executive of the Association of Residential Managing Agents (Arma), whose members, like those of Rics, are committed to a code of practice, agrees that such abuses exist, but argues that the agents are not always to blame. “It is often freeholders who are behind unnecessarily high costs to leaseholders,” he says, referring to a common - and legal - practice whereby freeholders deliberately retain the right to insure the building, then, in conjunction with the insurer, agree a premium that leaseholders are obliged to accept. In many cases, the insurer will pay back an “administration fee” to the freeholder.

The insurance policy wasn’t much help to the residents of a 1930s block in Streatham, south London, after a boundary wall was knocked down in a traffic accident. “It took the managing agents three years to get it repaired,” says Michael Magenis, 52, a civil servant who sold his two-bedroom ground-floor flat there in January. “Meanwhile, we had to live with a pile of rubble.”

Then there were the crack dealers. Magenis says he and other residents noticed that one flat received an extraordinarily high number of visitors, some in the small hours. “My doorbell would be rung late at night by people looking for this flat,” he says. “There were always people hanging around outside at weekends; it was frightening for some of the older residents.”

Numerous calls were made to the managing agents, who showed no interest.Eventually, one of the residents called the police and the crack den was raided. “It seemed we were getting little more for our service charges than a couple of black bin liners a week posted through the letter box,” Magenis says.

Get your money’s worth

Find out who the landlord and managing agents are. Check they belong to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (www.rics.org ) or the Association of Residential Managing Agents (www.arma.org.uk )

Be aware of your rights and responsibilities. Download the Living in Leasehold Flats brochure from www.arma.org.uk/publications

Make sure you are sent annual accounts by the managing agents and that you understand what they mean. Check what the money you are paying them is being spent on and whether there is a sinking fund for significant works

Join the residents’ association, attend meetings and get involved

If your problems persist, you should contact the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal, which resolves disputes between freeholders and leaseholders (www.rpts.gov.uk )

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