Where do I start with this.
What about why can't I give 0 stars.
Background. I own a property in a shared building in Bristol which has been 'managed' by BNS for over 15 years. They were OK in the noughties but have creepingly and progressively raised costs and got worse over the years to now where they manage around 300 properties and are really just about the money these days.
Here goes with the list:
- Unncecessary spurious charges (e.g. terrorism insurance).
- Use of own contractor companies (e.g. Hybrid Property Solutions, Priority 1, Konex, Block Plus, Business Non Stop, Spherical). The list goes on.
- Negligence to remove objects casuing fire risk / blocking basement access.
- Not taking meter readings when attending for inspections. Wanting to charge for it.
- Charging owners (yes charging the people who employ them) for late payment of levies which haven't been agreed and are only needed because BNS charge so much in the first place.
- Refusing / delaying to return funds to owners after more than 3 months since cancellation of services. Guidelines which BNS stated is legally applicable. Naughty BNS.
- Failure to ensure buildings insurance was in place for a period where it could have been implemented on an installment payment basis.
- Failure to provide finance statements at termination of contract in a timely manner.
- Condiiton of handover data (non existent filing structure).
- And my personal favourite introduced in the last year.....a fee (that translates as a charge to the owners) of £400+vat (that's £480) for all instances where a 'Section 20' (that's a few pieces of paper) is required to raise a levy (additional funds). Now note a Section 20 is required for any works costing more than £250 per owner. Think about that for a moment. Imagine there are 4 owners in a building (not unusual) and some work will necesitate raising an extra £1001 (not out of this world), then BNS will charge their bosses (the owners) £480. Yup, you read it correct. £480 or 48% of the levy. Now that's creative, for only producing a few sheets of paper. Marvelous. Somebody's got too much time on their hands to come up with that one.
I honestly don't know how this company has got this far. it must be purely down to cornering the market as decent management agents in Bristol are few and far between. I can't count the number of times I and the other owners have discussed changing agents, only to be stumped at the lack of options elsewhere and reluctantly deciding to 'just stay with BNS'. What fools we were.
The most hilarious thing about it all I've just noticed is that on their website (near the bottom) it adverises that BNS can save you Time, Money, Stress...... Well. I don't know what to say about that one. They should definitely change their website to say BNS can 'Waste lots of your time', 'Take lots of your money' and cause you lots of extra stress'.
Use if you want to waste time and get ripped off. They are basically an invoice creation machine. Somebody somewhere must have a yacht. You know who you are.
Anyway, the future looks bright as we are now managing the building ourselves and saving a small fortune in the process. It's not difficult but just takes some time. It definitely shouldn't cost what BNS charge for doing very little. And its good being in control of things. There should be more personalised honest managing agents out there. Maybe in the future.
One final thought: I think the review statistics says it all, don't you? 30 reviews with 37% bad and 47% average or below. I rest my case.
Beware.:) read more
