RMG – Woodilee Residents Association

An update on our appointment of a new factor:

As per our plan on 28th Jan we appointed Newton Property Management as our new factor from start of May and informed RMG that we wish to terminate their role at Woodilee finishing up end April.

RMG have now been in contact through an external legal firm who are reviewing the voting process run in October that provided the RA a mandate to progress these changes.

We are very confident we have done everything in alignment with deed of servitude and conditions.

A comprehensive summary of the process is recorded in the EGM minutes:

http://www.woodilee.org.uk/egm-2021-10-minutes/

Following the vote a tender process (including PQQ and ITT stages) was run with details found on our website:

http://www.woodilee.org.uk/manager-role-update/

It is also worth noting that all mechanisms used to run the vote were reviewed and validated previously by RMG when they were used to return the RA with new role holders (Chair, Treasurer, Secretary) at an AGM that RMG attended in 2020. These are now being questioned for the EGM, but RMG advised and implemented many of these for the previous AGM.

We feel it’s important residents are aware of this. Meantime our new factor continues to work towards the transition.

Following on from our post in January declaring an intent to progress the necessary steps to explore engaging a new factor for the estate, the WRA would now like to progress to the next stage and run a formal vote to seek authority to replace our current factor RMG. In February the WRA created a performance review document, a fact based assessment of RMG’s performance against their own Service Level Agreement. This document formed the basis of a formal complaint into RMG senior management. The document can be found here. RMG made commitments to address the concerns and failings but in the 9 months since the WRA has seen no improvement. Particular areas of frustration have been the inability to remediate longstanding drainage issues, the current asbestos situation, the broken stairs around the estate, inertia around remediating fairly urgent health and safety issues highlighted in Dec 2020 within the children’s play parks, ongoing problems around the grounds maintenance contractor relating to a dispute between them and RMG resulting in the estate grounds being in a terrible state and finally and not least, poor accounting and management systems which result in inordinately delayed and often inadequate communications in response to enquiries from the WRA or individual owners.

Over the next few days we’ll be posting a proxy voting form through every resident’s door. We ask you to provide us authority to decide who factors the estate. The papers will also provide further details on the authority provided and what the WRA proposes to do next. We will also be running an EGM on Wednesday 20th October at 7pm to ratify the vote and answer questions from residents.

All you need to do is sign, date, add your address to the voting form when it arrives, then take a photograph and return it to contact@woodilee.org

As per Part 2 of the Deed of Servitudes and Conditions, we require at least 20 % of owners to complete and return the proxy voting form , as described above. The Committee would strongly encourage every owner to take part in this important process.

New Factor Update

Update on factor arrangement with RMG