I look ahead to more interesting postings like this one. Does This Blog have a newsletter I can subscribe to for fresh posts?

I don’t like Factors but I don’t envy what they have to go through to make people honour their legal and contractual obligations in maintaining the common parts.

Those who propose ’self-factoring’ have no idea how stingy, selfish, petty, rude and apathetic and ungrateful their neighbours will be.

I used to come home from work to find notes shoved through my door demanding repairs without any offer to help to fix them or get abuse on my doorstep from those given a bill for their share that they refused to pay.

There were 14 adults in this building and at least three quarters of them did not lift a finger in many years of self-factoring other than to criticise the minority undertaking all the administration and property management upon their behalf.

2 out of 8 flats would not pay the small monthly sum and their flats were not insured, putting their neighbours at risk.

Now you could understand this in a block of absent landlords with a transient community of tenants and a high turnover of owners. Our block is largely owner-occupied, mainly with long-term owners, who are on first name terms. Nonetheless, getting money or assistance out of them was like extracting teeth while wading through treacle.

There’s this rather strange double-think at work whereby those that won’t pay and won’t help out are in fact the most demanding and critical about the quality of the self-factoring.

Despite failing to put any time, money or effort into keeping the infrastructure of the tenement sound and the common areas clean, they apply very high standards to those who volunteer.

They are not grateful that self-factoring saves considerable money because they will always resent having to pay any expenses. Nor will they pitch in to help – assuming that there’s loads of other people around to deal with it with these other people also holding that assumption.

Anyway, I organised for the flat to be factored and sure enough the owners aren’t happy with the cost or quality of their work.

But the main thing is that they have to direct their moaning about the service to someone else other than me.

My response to the inevitable shock about their escalating costs with no discernible rise in service quality is “well, the alternative is self-factoring but few were happy with it..if you’d like to sack the factor and establish a new owners association, go right ahead”