The facilities management 'profession' is looking after its interests, so it's about time apartment owners did the same, writes JACK FAGAN

DO YOU aspire to have letters after your name? If you do, then don’t bother enrolling in Trinity or UCD, just join the Irish Property Facility Management Association and you’ll be entitled to use the “designatory letters” MIPFMA. Better still, if you can get a corporate membership of this august body, then you can use the even grander designation of IPFMA.

The impressive titles will be available to members once the association endorses a new code of conduct at an EGM this week.

Lest you are not familiar with the association, it shares offices with the Society of Chartered Surveyors and represents management agents hired by the owners of apartment blocks to keep the places ticking over. They collect the service charges, check that communal lighting and alarm systems work and make sure that the bins are collected. They will even get you a plumber if the toilet is not flushing. A most valuable service, without which there could be mayhem in many apartment schemes, particularly some of the substandard ones in Dublin city centre.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of ambition in life so few will query the association’s aspiration in its detailed 11-page code of conduct to “guard and maintain the common respect and regard for property and facilities management as a profession”. Yes, that’s what they said, “a profession”.

Whatever about that definition, it is quite obvious from the code of conduct that despite all the meaningless guff about the need for increased consumer rights, this lobby group is all about protecting the interests – and contracts – of a select number of management agents. Why then would it warn that “a member, corporate member or affiliate shall not seek to supplant another member, corporate member or affiliate with that other member, corporate member or affiliate’s employer or client”. And if that is not enough, it also instructs members not to “impede, obstruct, disrupt or subvert the normal business operations of a fellow member”. In other words, don’t mess around with any incumbent agency.

As well as prescribing these anti-competitive practices, the IPFMA is also planning to introduce a gagging clause under section 2.2.3: “A member, corporate member or affiliate shall not maliciously cause, either directly or indirectly, to be injured the reputation, practice, employment or livelihood of a fellow member, corporate member or affiliate.”

It goes without saying that the vast majority of management agents in the Dublin area operate to the highest ethical standards but there are also some who availed of the unregulated status of the multi-unit residential market to set their own ground rules and make a killing in the process. Public concern about the way many of these private estates have been managed prompted the last government to set up the Property Services Regulatory Authority.

Although the agency is comfortably installed in the best office block in Navan for almost three years, little has been heard of it because the Oireachtas has still to pass a Bill to give it legal status.

Two pieces of legislation – the Property Services Regulation Bill and the Multi-Unit Developments Bill – introduced in the Seanad this summer – should bring some order to the area when they are, eventually, passed.

And when it finally gets its teeth, the property authority will undoubtedly be watching out for some of the sharp practices associated with the industry; collecting “commissions” on contracts and works; charging apartment owners for reading reports the agents commissioned; charging “courier services” as a matter of course; charging apartment owners late filing charges because the agents did not file on time with the companies’ office ; weekly charges for “maintenance site visits”; and the setting of management fees as a percentage of the overall cost of looking after a development. And it often does not end there.

With the members of IPFMA now adopting a new code of practice which will make it easier for them to hold on to their management contracts, it is timely for apartment owners to insist that management agents tender for the contract at least every two years. That will provide a level playing field for all management agents

With everyone (except the senior bankers) taking a pay cut, these firms should be no different.