luckycat68

Wow - have been reading this thread with interest
Cant beleive the prices you guys have to pay
Kuzmin pays £ 135 per month with equals £1620 per year
23 villas all paying that equals £ 37 260 and this is just for 1 sitesi

The property management companies sure hit on a good thing when brits started to buy !

Think we will give up the restaurant and start a management company - ha ha

cleeker

cm

Terry&Sue

Hi Clive and Liz
As your daughter runs Smile I would be interested by her comments on the current £82 a month charge on Ringspanner,s complex as, like many others, we could not entertain that kind of monthly expenditure for maintenance on a 2nd home we visit say 4-6 weeks a year at most.
We dont own there but have been staggered at these costs like many others and there seems to be no logic to the costings with some getting excellent services for less than half that price.
The current global crisis and escalating costs of day to day living means that this kind of expenditure will be the first thing that people cut down on.
Sitting on a 2nd home possibly dropping in value and seeing their food and energy bills soaring wont encourage people to fork out huge additional amounts to maintain the place

ringspanner

Thanks for all your replies, but to top it all, we have just recieved our first e-mail from SMILE as they take over the site from 1st June and to add insult they are putting the fees up due to the exchange rate. I only hope they know what they have gotten themselves into as I personally know a number of the site owners will refuse to pay . By the way the developer for this site is still advertising a mini bus as a part of the site fees. "STILL NO BUS ON SITE",

jeff

Sorry to hear that Ringspanner. No doubt Smile will provide you with a breakdown of their budget and be open with their accounts so that you can see where the money is going. Until we managed to change our management company the money seemed to disappear into a black hole and we really did not know what the money was being used for. At the moment we are happy to pay what we are paying on the basis that everything that was promised is being done but always subject to us being able to check the accounts and budget. Although I sympathise with your fellow owners I am not sure I condone people not paying. What happens then is that everybody suffers from the shortfall in fees and those who do actually pay get even less for their money. It is better to take action through the owners' management committee to ensure access to the accounts and that you have the ability to vote out the management company if they are not doing their job. One other thing is that our monthly fee is now set in Lira - which is fair given that all outgoings are in Lira.

lippy

Isn't it about time most maintenance companies realised that they are going to price themselves out of business.How can it be justified to pay double in Bodrum to what I pay in Diddim for a similar service.The houses are about seventy miles apart but you would think they were on a different planet by the charges.Aren't these companies aware that we are on the brink of a world wide recession and oil prices are rising by the hour.Both of these factors should have these companies thinking that the good days of ripping of their customers have gone and hopefully they will also be gone.
Maintenance companies must tighten their belts and start charging realistic prices.

Lush

Having just gone through a change in management company & looked at all the costs in detail.
We pay £45 for the smaller properties & £60 for the bigger detached villas. We have 49 properties on site. We can just about pay for all ameanities out of the combined maintenance money. We have a gardener, night watchman, part-time pool man. Communal electricity is about £225 per month, site insurance about £600 per year.
As most of us are away we need a company to manage the staff. But we did take the business away from the developer & his "friends". We ensure the maintenance company pays a fair price to emplyees and they have insurance. So all in all we do OK.
We also have a rolling program of pool refurbishment, property painting, wood re-varnishing & railing painting over a 4 year period. My guess is that fees will need to go up next year so we can build a contingency budget. But I think we pay a fair price for a very good service.

pldouglas

One of the reasons we sold our original apartment and bought a private villa instead, was the rising cost of maintenance, they simply couldn't be justified. In GB we have over half an acre of landscaped garden which I maintain easily on 3-4 hours a week, whereas less ground with only shrubs apparently needed a full time gardener in Yalikavak. Why? Okay, we don't have a pool in UK, but we have a large hot-tub which also needs high levels of chemicals and certainly costs a fraction of what we were paying in Turkey - check out the cost of pool chemicals in Turkey, they're not that high. Our security consisted of an elderly gentleman walking round all night blowing a whistle!!! Not only could we not sleep but it was clearly advertising the fact that the place was half empty. Site electricity was a joke for about 6 low watt lamps (why not use solar) and in the end we sold up and bought a villa which, co-incidently was opposite our old site and we now overlook it - and now we know how much maintenance is being done to that site. B***** all for £60 a month.

carolk

I agree with every word. Its a joke. All refuse to pay as we did and then the price will become more realistic as ours did and very quickly!!