How to Choose a Block Manager: The 2026 Checklist

Firing a bad managing agent is a victory. Hiring the next one is a minefield. Block management in England and Wales remains lightly regulated: anyone can legally set up shop, hold your reserve fund, and award contracts to their own preferred suppliers. Professional standards are largely voluntary. That means the burden of due diligence falls entirely on you as an RTM director, RMC director, or leaseholder. This guide cuts through the sales pitch and tells you exactly where bad agents hide their profits and what to look for instead.

There is still no mandatory licensing for property managing agents in England and Wales. The government accepted the Lord Best Working Group’s recommendation for a regulator back in 2019, but as of 2026 it remains unimplemented. That means any individual can set up tomorrow, call themselves a block manager, and start collecting your service charges. No qualifications required. No oversight. The only meaningful quality filters available to you are voluntary — which is exactly why the accreditation checks in this guide are non-negotiable, not optional extras.

If you haven’t yet won the right to appoint your own agent, read our Right to Manage (RTM) guide first — RTM gives qualifying leaseholders the power to take over management from the freeholder without buying the freehold and without proving fault. If you want to benchmark how bad your current agent really is before making the switch, our guide to complaining about your managing agent gives you a formal complaint template and the documented escalation process.

1. The Bare Minimum: Accreditations

If a prospective agent is not accredited by a recognised professional body, remove them from your shortlist before you read the rest of their proposal. In a market with no mandatory licensing for residential block managers, voluntary accreditation is the only safety net leaseholders have.

How to verify accreditation

Do not trust a logo in a brochure. Check every claim against the relevant register before the pitch meeting:

• TPI membership: search the TPI member directory at tpi.org.uk
• RICS regulation: search the RICS find-a-firm register at ricsregulatedfirms.com
• Client Money Protection: ask for the current CMP certificate and verify it against the scheme register; also check the GOV.UK list of approved CMP schemes
• TPO registration: every firm must belong to a government-approved redress scheme (TPO or PRS) — verify on the relevant scheme’s member register

Any firm that cannot produce current, verified evidence of all four is not managing your block.

2. Follow the Money: Fee Structures

The base management fee — typically £150 to £500 per flat per year for a residential block — is rarely where bad agents make their real money. It is the figure they lead with in their pitch. The profit is buried in Schedule B extras, Section 20 supervision percentages, and insurance income. Your job is to drag every income stream into daylight before you sign anything.

The base fee and Schedule B extras

The base fee normally covers day-to-day management: collecting service charges, arranging routine maintenance, attending one or two meetings per year, and keeping basic records. Everything else — extra meetings, complex dispute management, major project administration, company secretarial work, out-of-hours cover — typically appears in Schedule B as additional hourly rates or percentage charges.

Agents deliberately keep their headline fee competitive and then inflate Schedule B. Watch for vague wording such as “additional queries above what is reasonably expected” or “complex leaseholder management” — these are open-ended clauses that will generate unexpected invoices for routine contact. Insist that tasks critical to your block (arrears management, cyclical maintenance coordination, insurance renewal) are explicitly included in the core fee, and that Schedule B is fully itemised with specific rates rather than catch-all descriptions. Some agents list 30 or more Schedule B items; others bundle most into the base fee. There is no industry standard, which makes direct comparison genuinely difficult — and that ambiguity is deliberate.

When comparing three proposals, put every fee into a spreadsheet and model a realistic year: one AGM, two flat sales requiring LPE1 information packs, and one medium-sized maintenance project. That gives you the true annual cost to your building rather than the headline per-unit number the agent wants you to focus on.

Section 20 supervision fees: the big-ticket trap

This is where the real money is on large blocks. Under Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, agents must consult leaseholders before carrying out major works. When your block needs a £200,000 roof replacement, an agent with a 10–15% supervision fee clause will extract £20,000–£30,000 from the reserve fund simply for tendering the quotes and visiting the site periodically. Think about what that means in practice: £30,000 to the managing agent for writing a few letters and attending a handful of site meetings. First-tier Tribunal decisions have treated approximately 10% as within industry norms where it is authorised by the lease and the overall costs are reasonable — but that figure is routinely layered on top of already inflated contractor prices, or duplicated across multiple professional roles.

Ask every candidate to justify their Section 20 fee structure in writing, and — critically — ask whether they would accept a fixed fee instead of a percentage. A good agent will consider it. An agent who refuses reveals that they see major works primarily as a revenue opportunity. Before appointment, insist that any supervision fee is explicitly stated in the management agreement as a percentage with a monetary cap, tied to demonstrable project management work, and benchmarked against what your lease actually permits.

Building a like-for-like comparison

When you receive proposals, build a comparison table on a per-flat basis across every line. The headline fee is almost never the right number to compare.

Cost element	What to ask	Red flag
Base management fee	Cost per flat per year; exactly what is included	No clear list of included services
Schedule B extras	Full itemised list with specific rates	Open-ended hourly rates for routine tasks
Section 20 supervision	Percentage rate, scope, and monetary cap	No cap; percentage applied to inflated quotes
Insurance income	Written declaration of all commissions and broker fees	Refusal to disclose; vague “arrangement fee”
Company secretarial / AGM	Included or charged extra; rate if extra	Charged per letter, per leaseholder contact
Out-of-hours cover	Staffed or call-centre; spending authority limit	“Call centre” with no authority to deploy contractors

3. The Workload Ratio

The biggest industry secret is that a talented, conscientious property manager is completely useless if they are managing 40 different blocks. Agencies love to boast about large portfolios as evidence of market confidence; what those portfolios often mean in practice is that your building gets a fraction of one person’s attention.

Industry experience suggests that sustainable portfolios for a full-service residential block manager are typically in the range of 100 to 200 units. Some firms stretch managers to 200–300+ units at a measurable cost to service quality. Above 500–600 units, response times consistently deteriorate, proactive management disappears, and the manager is permanently in reactive firefighting mode regardless of how committed they are individually.

The one question that changes the conversation

In every pitch meeting, ask the agency director: “Exactly how many units and how many blocks will our named property manager be looking after if we appoint you?” Insist on a concrete number, not reassurances about “manageable portfolios.”

Then follow up: “How many assistant and support staff sit behind that manager? How is out-of-hours cover handled? What is your internal SLA for responding to leaseholder emails?” Firms that take workload seriously have clear answers, genuine rota systems, and measurable service standards. Firms that are overloading staff will deflect, generalise, and tell you about company culture instead of giving you numbers.

4. The Tech Stack and Transparency

In 2026, any serious managing agent should be running a modern, cloud-based property management platform. Dwellant, MRI/Qube, and comparable systems offer online portals where leaseholders can log maintenance issues with a digital audit trail, and where directors can see live service charge and reserve fund balances, income and expenditure in real time, copies of invoices and contracts, and the status of works orders. This is not a premium feature — it is a baseline expectation for transparent management.

Request a live demo login before you shortlist any agent. Pay close attention to whether the system exposes the underlying financial numbers or simply offers a cosmetic front end that still hides bank statements behind emailed PDF summaries. The distinction matters: a portal that shows you a monthly statement is very different from a portal where you can see the live bank balance of your reserve fund at any time.

An agent who is reluctant to give directors read-only live access to their building’s accounts is signalling a preference for opacity. That sits directly at odds with the transparency principles in the 2026 RICS Service Charge Residential Management Code, and should be treated as a serious disqualifying factor regardless of how their other credentials look.

5. Contractor Policy and Kickbacks

Your service charges fund a constant stream of contractor work: cleaning, gardening, routine maintenance, emergency repairs, and periodic major works. The margin between a fair contract and an overpriced one represents real money leaving your building. A managing agent with undisclosed relationships with preferred contractors can quietly inflate maintenance costs by 20–40% through exclusive arrangements, referral fees, or simply never tendering competitively.

Some agents own subsidiary maintenance companies and route work to their own teams at inflated prices — the building gets an invoice from a connected firm, the agent takes the margin, and you pay twice. Others receive volume-based rebates from contractors in exchange for a guaranteed pipeline of work. Neither arrangement is necessarily illegal, but both must be disclosed, and both should make you scrutinise every invoice carefully.

Ask every prospective agent to confirm in writing:

• That all contractor appointments above a sensible threshold — say £500–£1,000 — will be competitively tendered with at least two (and for major works, three) independent quotes, presented to directors with a recommendation before any contract is awarded.
• That no agent, director, or employee receives any financial benefit from contractors, suppliers, or brokers in connection with your building, other than what is disclosed in the management agreement.
• That you as directors retain the right to approve the contractor list and, for major works, to attend the tender evaluation.
• That they will comply with the Section 20 consultation process for any qualifying works.

Any reluctance to commit these assurances to paper is itself the answer to your question.

Six Killer Questions to Ask in the Pitch Meeting

Do not let the agency control the meeting. Before you receive their polished slide deck, send over your questions and insist on direct answers. Vague, deflected, or over-qualified responses are data.

• “Do you, or does any connected company, receive commissions, referral fees, or other financial benefits from our building’s insurance, contractors, or brokers — and will you disclose every payment in writing each year?” A good agent has a crisp, confident “yes, and here is how we do it.” An agent concealing income will qualify, deflect, or claim it is commercially sensitive.
• “Exactly how many units and blocks will our named property manager be responsible for after appointment, what is their average tenure at your firm, and what support staff sit behind them?” Get a concrete number — not a reassurance about “team structures.” The tenure question matters as much as the portfolio size: if managers leave every 18 months, your building is perpetually in a handover period with someone learning your building from scratch.
• “Can you give us a live demo login to your portal right now, where we can see the live bank balance of a client’s reserve fund?” Platforms like Dwellant and MRI/Qube can do this. Resistance to a live demo is a flag.
• “When you run Section 20 major works, what supervision fee do you charge as a percentage of the contract value, and is there a monetary cap written into the management agreement?” Push for the cap. An agent who says there is no cap on a percentage fee is telling you their fee scales without limit as works costs rise.
• “Are you TPI-accredited and/or RICS-regulated, do you hold a current Client Money Protection certificate, and do you follow the 2026 RICS Service Charge Residential Management Code?” Then verify every answer against the relevant registers before the next meeting.
• “How do you handle a leaseholder who refuses to pay service charges — what is your process, and at what point do you involve a solicitor?” Arrears management affects every leaseholder. A weak answer here signals weak enforcement across the board, which eventually means shortfalls that other leaseholders have to fund.

A Good Manager Pays for Themselves

A good managing agent is not a cost. A good managing agent is an investment that pays for itself through planned preventative maintenance (always cheaper than emergency repairs), competitively tendered contracts, properly managed reserve funds that earn interest, and lower insurance premiums negotiated through transparent broker arrangements. The difference between a competent agent and a negligent one can easily run to tens of thousands of pounds over a five-year management term. That is your money — every penny of it comes from leaseholders’ service charges.

The 2026 RICS Service Charge Residential Management Code makes fair budgeting and transparent procurement the explicit standard — but only directors who ask hard questions and hold agents to those standards in the management agreement actually get that service.

Your shortlist should be built on verified accreditation, dissected fee structures, a confirmed workload ratio, and a live portal demo — not on which firm sent the nicest brochure or whose director had the most engaging pitch. That is exactly what our directory is designed to support: hard data on accreditation, independent ratings, and coverage, so you can make a cold-eyed decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

This guide is general information about leasehold in England & Wales, not legal advice. Rules differ in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and leasehold law is changing — check your lease and current guidance, or take professional advice, before acting.

Last updated June 2026.