Charges
Ground Rent
There is no Ground Rent. Typically, it is a regular payment by the owner of leasehold property (i.e. you) to the freeholder. The original purpose of this was to provide an income to the landowner/freeholder. Seeing as Abbotdeal is now the freeholder, the only reason for continuing the payment of ground rent would be to finance any transactions that Abbotdeal has to make. However, Abbotdeal is a dormant company with no financial activity and so a resolution was agreed that the requirement to pay ground rent as stated in the leases was put on indefinite hold.
Service Charges
As noted in the section on the management company earlier, operating costs are incurred in the provision of some services and day to day running of Augustus Court and these are handled through Termstake. To cover these costs, past and budgeted, Termstake is obliged to recharge these back to you, the owner/leaseholders. These are also known as Service Charges. Termstake operates the general policy of collecting service charges in advance of the period in which they are expected to be used and to collect any further amounts as a result of any overspend in that same period after the whole financial year for the company (Termstake) is closed. Again this is typical practice for similar companies across the UK.
In recent years, the careful planning and management of the annual budgeted costs for Termstake have reduced the number of times overspend/balancing charges have had to be levied and the nominal annual increase in the main service charges is, presently, keeping roughly in line with the increase in costs payable by Termstake to third party suppliers. One of the responsibilities of the Directors is to increase the service charges regularly by appropriate amounts to ensure that they maintain this level of parity with the external costs and other national inflationary pressures.
The amount of the service charge levied is dependent on whether your lease is for an external unit (Nos. 10-12) or an internal one (all others) and it is collected twice a year - April and October.