As we welcome 2025, we take a moment to reflect on our achievements in 2024. We successfully saved our clients £46 million in service charge and insurance costs, managing service charges across over 18,000 properties with total liabilities of £694 million, spanning the UK, Europe and internationally.
The Retail and Leisure team at Assure have had another outstanding year, saving our clients a remarkable £26 million. These savings stem from a variety of challenges, including identifying charging errors, scrutinising budget expenditures, and ensuring caps are correctly applied. Our team has meticulously examined the numbers and lease terms to uncover these savings.
With surging inflation and the energy crisis, we have been working on and re-assessing our client’s forecast property spend for 2023. There has been a great deal of economic turbulence that has had an impact on inflation across all service cost categories.
The findings were disturbing, with uncertified service charge expenditure going back as far as 2013 and amounting to an aggregate sum in excess of £1 billion, with £583million relating to 2020 and 2021 when actual expenditure was well below budget levels due to the impact of Covid.
For us to understand what will happen to Service Charge budgets in 2022, we need to look back. In 2021 service charge budgets reduced by 9% for Shopping Centres and 4% for Retail/Leisure Parks. This was mainly due to the withdrawal of major works and reduced marketing throughout the lockdown periods. There was relatively little in the way of reduced manpower costs, despite Furlough, so that’s one to look out for as we await the final reconciled service charge accounts…
