‘A form of double taxation’: Are management fees on new houses quietly getting out of control?
https://www.thejournal.ie/management-fees-omcs-7026947-May2026/
Posted by Banania2020
‘A form of double taxation’: Are management fees on new houses quietly getting out of control?
https://www.thejournal.ie/management-fees-omcs-7026947-May2026/
Posted by Banania2020
14 Comments
>The housing estate uses communal bins rather than individual bins for each house, with 81 bin stores dotted across the estate.
>This year’s draft budget, seen by *The Journal*, saw the budget for lighting these bin stores increase from €8,000 last year to €48,600 this year.
so the actual cost of lighting is around €8k a year, and because the idiot developer couldn’t work out a way to connect the 81 bin stores on one meter, they’re just going to throw away an additional 40k a year.
They are getting ridiculously high in some instances, and in some places they don’t even give you any benefit if you live in a house and not an apartment.
My wife and I looked at a house in an estate that was a mix of apartments and houses, there was a €1200 annual management fee that each unit had to pay, it covered maintaining the elevators, bin stores and underground car park, none of which was available to people who lived in the houses so you were just paying for someone else’s stuff.
Management fees are the privatisation of council services without any corresponding reduction in taxation. It is an outrageous and perverse dereliction of the State’s duty, and an entirely unnecessary economy. There is also a social impact because these communities have even less social bonding through the lack of residents groups & tidy neighbourhood organisations, who would normally do a lot of the work out of pride and neighbourly goodness. It also strips any essence of community identity, because some contractor comes in to do the bare minimum and the management company just paints everything the same awful colour(s) to save on costs. So many negatives and absolutely no positives. Apartment complexes are the exception due to their nature but the fees are out of hand in them too.
The council are in the process of taking over our estate after 9 years, when I learned they wouldn’t be cutting the grass I was pretty pissed off. I know it sounds silly but the council required our estate to have shrubs and bushes all over the estate, including between every 4 parking spaces, which they also required because they don’t want people having driveways, but we’re left with the massive landscaping bill because they won’t touch any of it, they won’t even cut the grass. This year landscaping cost €93,000.
We also have to have our own bins on the footpath due to being next to a Lidl as the litter is bonkers, pest control and gritting in Winter. I bet they won’t want to touch any of that too. Happy to collect everyone’s property tax though. I reached out to a local councillor about the council contributing to the landscaping fees because traditional estates get grass cutting, there’s no reason we should be worse off. We’ll see what excuse the higher ups pull out of their arse.
isn’t this an old con?
the Developer is the management company until the development is complete,the developer keeps a few of the apartments in a block or delays the completion of the building so the development is not complete the developer ramps up the maintenance charges on the development.
I think I remember hearing about something like this in the 90’s some places had to get a court order to get completion
Look up the service charge/leasehold crisis in England. Absolutely not something we want to replicate.
I’m stuck paying a grand a year and it’s crazy. If the council don’t want to provide services fine, then anyone paying this should be exempt from property tax.
Yet another item added to the list that shows how Americanized we have become.
Strange. We bought a house on a new estate in north Dublin in 2022 and there are no such charges.
For apartments there’s nothing unusual. Essentially the apartment owners are like shareholders. The money pays for shit like elevators, security gates, maintenance, common area insurance etc etc. if you had a house you pay this shit yourself. It’s not a scam. It sucks but if you wanna live in an apartment it comes with it.
In places where there’s facilities such as gym or party room etc then you’re paying for that also.
There’s already many examples of double and triple taxation in this country. What’s another one?
It’s a scam so developers can continue get paid long after the initial sales.
Calling everything you don’t like “double taxation” is getting out of control
There are really two compounding parts to the problem of growing management fees. The first is that service providers know they can overcharge management companies, especially when the largest shareholders are commercial landlords who ultimately look at the management fee as a tax deductible rounding error so have no reason to push back.
The second is the standard to which apartments/managed estates are expected to be built and kept in the first place. As nice as it is, there is no need for landscaping, concierge services, parking enforcement, window cleaning, etc.
I’ve stayed in AirBnBs across Europe in old buildings with dodgy loose electrical work in the hallways, 40 year old lifts (or none at all), filthy communal areas. Sure it’s not as pretty as the typical apartment block back home, but millions of people live quite comfortably in such buildings and pay 10x less in management fees.
We’ve regulated (and accustomed) ourselves into an unreasonable standard of maintenance and now we are paying the price.