Could your building save thousands? Let's do the maths.

If you own a leasehold flat, you pay a service charge every year. A big slice of it goes to a managing agent to run your building. But have you ever stopped to ask what you are actually getting for that money, and whether you could do it better yourselves?

Across much of Europe, people who own flats simply run their own buildings together. No managing agent. No middleman. They decide how their money is spent, and they save a lot by cutting out the extra cost on top. There is no reason you cannot do the same here, and Free The Flat makes it simple.

Let's look at what that means in real money.

What a building actually spends

Take a building with 10 flats. In a typical year, its costs fall into three groups.

Paying the agent

• Managing agent fee: £3,600
• Accountant to prepare the accounts: £1,050

Work the building pays contractors to do

• Cleaning, inside and windows: £3,000
• Repairs and maintenance: £3,800
• Grounds and upkeep: £1,200
• Fire safety checks and works: £2,900

Costs that do not really change

• Communal lighting and water: £1,300
• Money set aside in the building's savings pot (sinking fund): £4,000

That middle group is the interesting one, and we will come back to it. But look first at the top group. The managing agent charges £3,600 a year simply to run the building, and the building pays around £1,050 more for an accountant to prepare its accounts. That is £4,650 a year on management and paperwork, before a single light bulb is changed. (Agent fees vary widely, from around £250 to £500 a flat a year depending on the building; we've used a mid-range figure here.)

Step one: the swap

Free The Flat costs £20.40 per flat each month, including VAT. For a 10-flat building, that is £2,448 a year for the whole building.

So the first move is a straight swap:

• Managing agent fee: £3,600, gone
• Accountant's fees: £1,050, gone, because our tool prepares your accounts for you
• Free The Flat: £2,448

And here is the part that matters most. A managing agent's fee comes back every single year. So does that saving.

Step two: take charge of your contracts

This is where the real difference shows up, and it happens in your first year.

A managing agent usually does not shop around. They ring the same handful of companies they always use, and they often add their own fee on top of the bill, or take a quiet cut from the contractor, paid for out of your service charge without you ever seeing it.

Putting the very same work out to the open market is a different thing entirely. Real companies competing properly for the job brings the price down. When you run your own building, you get the quotes, you pick the deal, and every pound you save stays in your building's account where it belongs.

That applies to your cleaning, your repairs, your maintenance, your grounds. And it applies to your safety checks too.

To put a number on it: this building spends about £10,900 a year on cleaning, repairs, grounds and safety checks. Stripping out a typical 20% managing-agent markup on that work saves roughly £1,800 a year, about £180 per flat.

Fire safety, done right

Your building needs its fire safety checks. That is the law, and it keeps everyone safe. We would never suggest skipping a single one.

But those checks are carried out by contractors, like everything else, and a managing agent can mark them up just the same. Arrange them yourself and you pay for exactly the same checks at a fair price, not an inflated one. Safety stays. The markup goes.

And then there are the big jobs

Every building faces them eventually. A new roof. A lift overhaul. Repainting the whole outside. These major works are not part of the normal yearly budget, and they are where leaseholders get the nastiest surprises, a single bill that can run into thousands of pounds per flat.

A big job is the most important one of all to put out to proper competition, and it is exactly where a managing agent's marked-up favourite contractor costs you the most. On work worth thousands, the gap between an inflated price and a fair, openly quoted one can be hundreds or even thousands of pounds, on that one job alone.

When you run your own building, you get to do this properly. You see every quote. You choose. And on the biggest costs your building will ever face, that is where taking control really pays off.

What does not change, and why we will not pretend otherwise

Some costs stay the same whoever runs the building, and we are not going to tell you otherwise.

The communal lights still need power. The water still gets paid for. And the money you put aside for your building's future is your own savings, not a cost at all. What changes is simple: you stop paying a middleman to sit on top of everything, and you decide where your money goes.

The bottom line

For a building with 10 flats, taking charge with Free The Flat works out at around £400 saved per flat in a typical year (for a typical building of 1-2 bedroom flats), rising to about £540 a flat where your agent's fees are at the top of the market. Not as a one-off. Every single year.

And that is before the big jobs. In any year your building faces major works, like a new roof or a lift overhaul, taking charge of those contracts saves you more again, often far more.

You do not need permission. You do not need to wait. The law already lets you take over the running of your building, and we walk you through every step.

Take control. Run the block. Save thousands.

Test it today.