A quick recap of where we are at the moment and a few explanations. At the moment the directors of our management company are Pat Curran and Pat Gorman who are employees of Shannon Homes and KPM are employed by the management company to manage our estate. Ronan McGuire is the KPM property manager responsible for our estate.

The role of KPM is to collect management fees and arrange the provision of services for estate.

The role of Balgriffin Residents Committee is to represent the issues of all residents and ensure that KPM are carrying out their responsibilities as agreed.

Since the beginning of the year we have been clarying the organisation of the committee resulting in the appointment of interim chairperson, secretary and treasurer. This is intended to define roles within the committee resulting in clearer communications between KPM, the committee and all residents.

The committee has been meeting with KPM to address issues with the management of the company throughout the year, since before the previous property manager changed last year the committee has been requesting various information from KPM including accounts information and debtors/creditors information. A meeting was held with KPM at the beginning of this week where some of this information was received and we are currently reviewing this information. KPM have also agreed to provide monthly statements regarding the financial state of the company  which will assisst the committee in having an ongoing understanding of where the company is at.

Regarding the present state of the company a quick summation would be that there are ongoing issues with non-payment of management fees which during the year contributed to the reduction in some services. KPM are now going to proceed with a more focused debt collection policy and the pursuing of debts through court proceedings.

On the issue of management fees the fact is that they are part of the legal contracts that we signed when we purchased our homes and they will have to be paid at some stage, there just is no escaping them. If you have unpaid management fees you will be unable to sell your house until they are paid. Unpaid fees will also result in court proceedings, court orders etc.

Now if you are unhappy with the amount of fees that you pay there is only one course of action and that is to participate in your residents committee and management company and see what can be done to reduce the amount of fees that are paid. 

It is in our own interests to pay these fees as they enable the maintenance and upkeep of our estate.

Currently the committee has requested all existing contracts for services provided to the management company and insisting that for all future contracts three written tenders be received before the awarding of any contract.

The committee is also reviewing accounts information relating to the previous two years operation of the company supplied by KPM. As an aside it is a legal requirement of every management company to submit accounts to the companies registration office which can be downloaded from www.cro.ie These same accounts will be reviewed at the AGM which the management company is also obliged to hold every year.

The committee is also currently investigating securing greater legal representation for residents in regards to the management company and kindly a local solicitor has been giving the committee some legal advice in relation to this. I’ll go into more detail when indeed there are further details to give.

As well as this the committee discusses with KPM minor operational issues that residents may have with various services and the steps taken to rectify them. We bring up any issues that we are aware of or hear from other residents so if you have any it’s a good idea to inform the residents committee as well as KPM so that we can add it our agendas for meetings and ensure that it is followed up. So feel free to email these to the secretary:

secretary (at) balgriffin.com

And that about wraps up the recap for the moment, in future I’ll post up ongoing updates and expand in more detail on what’s in this post.

If there are any issues that you wish answered by the committee then feel free to either add a comment or email the above address and we’ll do our best to answer them if we can.

As a first post I’ll just copy the post that Rachel made on the forum so you all know who is on the committee. Later I’ll give a synopsis on what the residents association has been up to of late and what we are hoping to achieve.

So the residents association do be:

Chairperson: Sandra Clarke-St. Samsons court 

Secretary:  Rachel Egan- St Samsons court

Treasurer: Shane Grimes- St. Samsons Square 

John Ferguson -Castlemoyne 
Fiona Murphy – Castlemoyne
Julian Seymour- St. Samsons Square 
Edward Armstrong-St. Samsons Square 
Michael Merrigan-St Samsons court 
Tom Fingleton-St Samsons court 
Gerry Colrevy-St. Samsons court 
Gaetan Meister- St Samsons court 

If you want to contact the residents committee then please contact:

secretary (at) balgriffin.com

And should you wish to join the committee let us know, new members are always welcome. 

And for now, that’s all folks. Thanks for listening!

S