Estates & Management Reviews

Oh boy, where do I begin? Let me tell you about the worst job I ever had… It’s been a few years since I left e&m. I was only there for about 10 months, but it has stuck in my memory because the experience was so awful. I think working at e&m almost gave me PTSD it was that bad. I remember e&m as being utterly dysfunctional in every way imaginable. Working at e&m was like the worst of admin work combined with the worst of call-centre work - frustrating bureaucracy and dealing with angry customers, all day, every day. At the time they only accepted payments by cheque for some reason, and every cheque had to be manually processed and docketed. The admin team that processed cheques was too small to cope with the volume of cheques coming in on a daily basis. This led to a huge backlog of paperwork stretching back months. In turn this meant we were receiving a deluge of angry emails and phone calls on a daily basis from leaseholders, solicitors and conveyancers who were understandably frustrated and outraged that it took us months to respond to a simple request. Unfortunately they had no-one to take out their frustration on except overworked and underpaid admin staff like me, instead of the directors who were ultimately responsible for this mess. There were property transactions that fell through because it took e&m so long to respond to anything, at great cost to the vendor. There was not enough staff to deal with this volume of calls, and waiting times of 30 minutes or longer were not unusual. The more time I spent taking calls the less time I had to process paperwork and cut through the backlog, so it felt like a lose/lose situation. When I did take calls, there was usually nothing I could do to help the person on the other end of the line because it would take weeks for their correspondence to even reach me. I couldn’t give anyone a definite time-frame on how long it would take to process their paperwork, and I couldn’t give any explanation for why they were being treated in such a callous way, all I could do was apologise. These angry calls and emails were exacerbated by the extortionate fees that e&m charged to leaseholders. e&m would charge hundreds of pounds in fees for basic legal documents that an administrator on minimum wage could print off in a few seconds. They seemed to rely on leaseholders’ ignorance of property law to present these fees as being a legal requirement, when in fact they were only a company policy. It was common for people to overpay the fees, and e&m would pocket the difference without telling the leaseholder that they had overpaid. The entire business model of e&m amounted to little more than exploiting the vagaries and nuances of property law to scam leaseholders out of their cash. For example I remember e&m would send letters from a debt collection agency to pursue unpaid fees. In reality this agency was entirely fabricated - these letters were sent by e&m, but on headed paper to make it look as if they had come from a debt collection agency. Their strategy was to threaten leaseholders with legal action and hope that they would be spooked enough to cough up the money. e&m is at the end of a long chain of dubious shell companies registered in tax havens such as the Bahamas and British Virgin Islands. The ultimate beneficiary of this shady arrangement is the Tchenguiz Family Trust owned by the Tchenguiz brothers. Sadly I know that the issues at e&m will never be fixed, because from the perspective of senior management, the company is working exactly as intended. e&m is very effective at doing what it was designed to do, which is to fleece leaseholders in the UK and send the cash offshore and into the coffers of the Tchenguiz brothers. e&m effectively has a local monopoly as freeholder over the properties they own, which is why they can get away with such obnoxious rent-seeking behaviour. It is hard to say how any of this was legal. It seems e&m operates in a legal grey area where there is inadequate regulation. The government should change the law to stop this extortion, but since the Tchenguiz brothers are major donors to the Tory party, I won’t hold my breath. We can only hope a future Labour government will put an end to this nonsense. I also remember being told they cut down trees on their properties because they didn’t want to pay the cost of maintaining them, so we can add ecological crimes to the list. As an employee of e&m, I found they were just as apathetic and exploitative to their staff as they were to their leaseholders. The salary was minimum wage, and the training was also minimal. When I asked for a work reference, they told me they would only provide the bare minimum e.g. period of employment, number of sick days etc. and not offer a character reference. This was despite me working overtime for months to help deal with the backlog. HR seemed completely indifferent, they didn’t even bother to read my resignation letter. In general working at e&m was a very stressful and depressing experience. Turnover was high because most sane people would leave as soon as they could, which just made them even more understaffed. To this day e&m remains the worst place I have ever worked. This company is utterly cynical, thuggish, obnoxious, deceitful, parasitical and corrupt. Their business model is borderline criminal, based on charging absurd fees and threatening people if they will not pay. For a glimpse of the amount of frustration and misery caused by e&m, just read any of the reviews on google and trustpilot which are almost entirely negative. Summary: Don’t work here if you have an ounce of professionalism or ethics. This company is a morally bankrupt cesspit. Literally any other company in London would be better.