Managing Agent Tribunal Track Record

How to read this page

• What this is. When a leaseholder and a landlord or managing agent cannot agree about a service charge, either can take it to the First-tier Tribunal. The tribunal publishes its decisions. We read those decisions and count them up here.
• Appearing here is not an accusation. A company on this list has been to tribunal — that is all. Plenty of disputes are honest disagreements about what is reasonable, and a company managing thousands of flats will naturally appear more often than a small one.
• Two very different kinds of case, kept apart. A bill challenge is a leaseholder saying "this charge is too high" and the tribunal deciding whether it was fair. A request to skip consultation (its legal name is a Section 20ZA dispensation) is the opposite: the landlord asking to be let off consulting residents before major works. The landlord is the one asking, and no money comes off the bill. Mixing the two together would make a landlord's win look like a leaseholder's, so we never combine them.
• "Leaseholder won" means the bill was cut. Sometimes the tribunal removes a charge completely; more often it cuts part of it. Both count as a win here, and each company's expanded row shows the split. It does not mean anyone was found dishonest.
• One row per company. Decisions spell company names in different ways. We match them to Companies House and count them as one, so a firm does not appear twice. The other spellings are listed in each company's expanded row.
• The agent is often not a named party. The front page of a decision usually lists the leaseholder who brought the case and the freeholder who owns the building. The managing agent is normally named further into the decision, giving evidence on the landlord's behalf. So if you open a decision and do not see the company at the top, that is expected — we read the full decision, not just its header.
• Why your agent might not be listed. We list a company once we have confirmed it against Companies House, or once it has appeared in ten or more decisions. Decisions sometimes name an individual rather than a firm, or run two firms together in one line, and we deliberately do not publish those — a person's name is not a company record. So a missing agent means either no tribunal decisions, or a name we have not yet been able to tie to a registered company.
• Small numbers can mislead, so we account for that. A company that won three out of three looks perfect but tells you very little. We order the list so that a strong record over many cases ranks above a perfect record over a handful, and we always show how many cases a figure is based on.
• Solicitors are not managing agents. Law firms sometimes appear in decisions alongside the agent. We check Companies House and leave them out of these tables.
• Most service charges never reach a tribunal. This is only the disputed minority, so it is not a report card on any company's overall service.

Source: ServiceCharges.AI analysis of First-tier Tribunal service charge decisions. Last updated: loading…