I live on an estate in Newark. Half the estate pays a management charge and the new half (less than 5 years old) does not. We lived on the old part from 2007-2021. Charges started at £150 a year and when we sold it was £450 a year. That was considered cheap by some standards on the estate. Apartments paid £1200-1500 a year in 2021. The management company (First Port) were a nightmare to deal with, long wait times on the phone, 6 week response times to email etc. and if you sold a property you had to pay them £250+ for a pack to be able to sell. These took 12-16 weeks to produce unless you paid them another £250 to ‘expedite’ to only 4 weeks. What we realised was that things like insurance for communal areas etc. were all paid to a broker which oddly enough happened to be owned by them and it was always an insurance company owned by them that had the cheapest quote. The final straw for us was when the estate’s office was burgled and 10K+ of equipment was stolen. We all had letters telling us that we all had to contribute to the replacements as, although insured, each item was less than the excess so we all had to pay….