Can you start by explaining why planning for the long term management of residential buildings is important?

Of course.

I think we have to remember that buildings need to stand up for the length of the lease that's been granted.

So that might be 125 years, but we're now seeing 999 years.

So what I see is that sometimes clients and leaseholders especially where they're residents they have a shorter term focus because they're maybe thinking i'll be here for five years i might be here just for one or two years but ultimately as a director of a residential company or a freeholder you're responsible for the long-term life of that building and keeping it as a safe place for people to live and so you have to kind of have a bit of a forecast of what's coming down the road how long will my roof last how long Will the tarmac in the car park last before it needs to be replaced? Because those are not cheap projects.

They're not things that you can just find out and go, oh, everybody, we just need to pay £100,000 and get this done.

So if you can have better planning of what's coming up, then you can be more informed, you can plan your budgets, you can plan your reserves.

When you're appointing competent contractors, how do you make sure that they are competent?

Mm-hmm.

And then, uh, leaseholders are invited to nominate a contract for those works and to make observations on those works.

So if that was to say we're gonna do external decorations, to kind of say, "Well, actually, it doesn't need external decorating," or, "It was done two years ago," or, "Could you include the front door in that?" And then to nominate a contractor, and that can be any contractor, um, at the moment.

They're looking at changing it so that it is more around a competent contractor being nominated.

Once you've done that, leaseholders have thirty days to make those observations to those nominations.

You can move on to stage two, which is the statement of estimates.

So then you go out, you tender the project, you get some quotes back, and then you go to your leaseholders with your stage two notice under Section 20, and you say, "These are the quotations that I have received, it, after that first notice.

But what's the difference then between qualifying works and a long-term qualifying agreement?

How does the lease sit within the wider legal framework and your side legislation and the Landlord and Tenant Act and that sort of thing? Where does it sit? I know you said it's the Bible.

So your lease is basically how you occupy your property and it's very specific to your building, your property.

Legislation is then overarching in relation to the sector as a whole, but generally legislation trumps the lease.

So we're seeing now with the Motives Rights Act being introduced, they're saying that tenants will be afforded more rights in relation to pets.

now we're all very familiar with leases that say that you can't have pets other than with the landlord's consent or you can't have pets well if the legislation actually trumps that and says there are cases in which pets must be allowed in properties and one such case is if it's an assistance animal so if it's a guide dog even if the lease says you can't have it legislation says you've got to allow it So there are elements where legislation will trump the lease, and there are elements where the lease will actually somewhat trump legislation if it's very much specific to how that building operates.

So it's really important to have an appreciation of everything because you don't have the management agreement that sits alongside it, but that is only how you as a managing agent manage the property, what you've agreed to do or not to do.

It doesn't change what the lease or legislation says.

Yeah,

They're going to learn how to both think like a documentarian as well as learn how to put it together.

We are always kind of in conversation with our teachers about the types of things that they are interested in and the art forms that they want to explore.

And we've done a lot of performing arts in the past.

You know, we've studied opera.

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And so through a relationship that we have with Joe Deere, he introduced us to Nicole Simmons, who's the director of the Hanks Center and the programming there.

you know, always find a way to squeeze someone in.