Right-to-buy saw local authorities and housing associations now becoming property factors with a whole new set of legislation to adhere to. Of course, many of these new owners would have thought the purchasing of their flats would put an end to this relationship and were surprised that they would still have to pay a ‘fee’ to their previous landlord, a common complaint still even after forty years. Of course, now with the end to right-to-buy, we shouldn’t be seeing an increasing number of factored owners in local authority or housing association stock unless your business model is to build mixed-tenure estates.

There have, of course, always been commercial factors successfully offering property management services to owners for decades in Scotland with whom those in the social housing sector would be unlikely to engage with in the past, though now some of these organisations are currently offering their services to RSL clients.

Factoring property in Scotland whether as an RSL or commercial factor is a challenge with the historical nature of landownership resulting in difficult-to-read deeds, not to mention the issues with the aforementioned mixed tenure estates.

Thankfully over the years, legislation was introduced to support owners work out some of these issues and the Property Factors (Scotland) Act 2011 and the code of conduct weeded out any ‘rogue’ factors so owners now had more choice and dispute mechanisms were in place should they wish to complain via the introduction of the Act.

The code also highlighted the need for staff or anyone involved in the factoring of property in Scotland to keep their skills up to date and attend regular training to ensure that they were skilled enough to respond to owners’ questions or complaints.

If you work in factoring or are involved in the management of property in any way you should ensure that your skills are up to date so you are compliant with the code and have improved your general understanding of the fundamentals of factoring in Scotland.

Twice a year SHARE delivers the IRPM associate course which will give you the fundamentals of factoring property in Scotland. For more information about our upcoming courses click HERE