Background: The Rodings Estate
The Rodings Estate was built in 2011 by Redrow Homes. It consists of 268 properties - mostly terraced houses but also some flats. The terraced houses are “fleecehold”, i.e. sold as freehold but with a covenant for an estate rentcharge. The flats are leasehold, and Redrow sold the freehold for some of them to Aviva in 2013.
Redrow created a company, The Rodings (Loughton) Management Company Ltd, to manage the estate. Every freeholder and every leaseholder is automatically a member of this company. So there are 268 members, but only a few of them attend to vote at meetings. (Note: If you look it up on Companies House you will find the legal structure of the company is a hybrid of two separate companies with similar names but it operates as one company.)
This company is controlled by a board of directors. The directors are elected by the members at an annual meeting.
Rodings Ltd is named in the house deed covenants so it can levy an annual estate ‘rentcharge’ on the freeholders of the houses. It is also named as a third party in the leases of the flats, so it takes over the majority of the obligations of the freeholder, Aviva, to provide services and maintenance for the flats. It levies an annual service charge on the leaseholders of the flats to pay for this. It is not permitted to hold any funds or do any business of its own - merely to hold funds ‘in trust’ and act on behalf of its members.
Rodings employs a managing agent, HML, to do most of their day to day work.
2023: Service charges increase
The service charges for the flats have always been much higher than the charges on the houses, due to the nature of flats requiring more shared services. However from around 2023 onwards the charges on the flats began to drastically increase, well above the rate of inflation.
No-one seemed to know the real cause (other than that it coincided with Rodings hiring a new firm of accountants with different methods of apportionment), but it appeared to be a major shift transferring the burden of costs from the house freeholders to the flat leaseholders. The board of directors of Rodings Ltd consisted entirely of house freeholders at this time, which didn’t help to allay this impression, so many leaseholders were angry.
January 2025: Rodings AGM
A group of leaseholders attended the Rodings AGM to complain about the charges. Rodings allowed 2 leaseholder directors to join the board.
Unfortunately they were not able to make substantial changes and service charges continued to increase. It seemed to us that even with the best intentions of the board, the goals of managing a large estate were just not aligned with the goals of managing a single building.
The Right To Manage
The Right To Manage gives leaseholders the right to manage the buildings they live in. It is defined by:
The RTM Companies (Model Articles) (England) Regulations 2009
Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002
It requires a majority of leaseholders in a building to vote to take control of the management of their building.
Thus we embarked on the RTM process, which would transfer all charges and obligations in the leases of our building from Rodings Ltd to a new company, Campus Court RTM Company Ltd, owned by us, the leaseholders.