We live on an estate, built about 9/10 years ago. Most of the properties are freehold although quite a few are BTL rather than owner-occupied. There is some communal land (mostly a long strip of trees and a "playground" (
) - basically a small enclosure with a wooden mushroom in.) that we pay a property management company to look after. The yearly fee has gone up by 50% in the last couple of years and no-one on the estate is terribly happy, especially since they don't seem to do much maintenance either.
Does anyone know if there's a way of "firing" the property management company and hiring an alternative (or possibly doing it ourselves?)?
I googled and found information about setting up a Resident's Association to deal with it, but that seemed to be about leasehold flats so I wasn't sure if it applied to freeholds.