Every house or flat sold by Manor Estates or another property owner is subject to conditions contained in the Title Deeds for that property.
The Title Deeds set out the property owner’s rights and responsibilities in relation to their own property and to the others within the estate. In practice this means that when you purchase a property you take on rights and responsibilities not just for your own house but also relating to the wider area.
The Title Deeds impose “real” obligations on the owner of the property. This means that these obligations will continue even when a house has been sold with responsibility passing to the new owner.
Your Title Deeds establish your responsibility for meeting a share of the cost of maintaining the shared areas within your estate.
The Deeds also give Manor Estates the right, as factor, to recover the direct costs of any work as well as all costs incurred in managing the factoring service.
A recent legal case confirmed the Association’s right to recover the costs involved in providing the factoring service and described the costs as “entirely reasonable, if not modest”. If you are unsure about any aspect of your responsibilities as a home owner, you should seek advice from your solicitor.
Selling Your Home
When you decide to sell your home please ensure that you inform your solicitor that Manor Estates is the factor for your estate. This will allow us to update our records and make sure that future accounts are issued to the current owner. A re-sale administration fee is charged for this service. The reason for this is because when a solicitor requests information regarding their clients property and charges due to the sale date we are required to respond by providing information on the property, the estate and apportion the annual account to the actual sale date. This takes staff and administration time which is not included in the annual charges raised.
Sub-Letting
It is essential that you notify us if you are sub-letting. This is to ensure that you receive up to date information from us about your property and that we can contact you should we need to do so.
Paying Your Account
For owners of houses, invoices are issued annually and include the cost of works carried out in your estate, including grass cutting and shrub maintenance. For flat owners invoices are issued six monthly and also include the cost of any repairs to the common parts of the building and building insurance costs.
All invoices include your share of the costs of providing the factoring service.
You can pay your account by Debit/Credit card – please call our Finance Team for details. Additionally you can pay:
- Free of charge at any branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland using the payment slip at the bottom of your account.
- By cheque posted to our offices (with your address and customer reference number on the back please).
- By Direct Debit/Standing Order.
- On-line through direct banking from your account to ours.
Debt Management
It is our policy to pursue all the amounts we are due. The alternative would be to increase our charges to the responsible majority, which we think would be unfair. We are always willing to discuss payment by instalments, so please contact us if you want to arrange this.
Where payment is not received and no contact is made, accounts are passed to a Sheriff Officer, who will use all legal means to ensure payment. This can include court orders, wages arrestments and ultimately obtaining letters of inhibition over the property. This can result in a “black mark” which could affect your credit rating.
The costs of legal proceedings are payable by the property owner. We issue inhibition orders to owners who continually fail to keep up payments on their accounts, this means that owners need to pay their debt to us before they can sell their home or re-mortgage it.