More than half of leaseholders say they don't fully understand what they're being charged for in their service charge. That's not usually because anyone's hiding anything from them. Itemised reporting and a proper audit trail were simply never built into how block management traditionally works.
Bills arrive as a total, the total goes up most years, and there's rarely an easy way to see exactly what changed and why. We wanted to know what a full breakdown actually looks like in practice.
So we pulled the real costs for two buildings and laid them out line by line. Here's what a managing agent charges for each service, and what the equivalent costs when the same building is self-managed. For the legal side of what you're entitled to see, our service charges guide covers your rights in full.
Building A: the full breakdown
For this building, we compared the real managing agent bill against the equivalent self-managed cost, using the building's actual insurance premium rather than an estimate.
| Service | Managing agent | Self-managed |
|---|---|---|
| Fire checks | £1,000 | £350 |
| EICR | £762 | £180 |
| Insurance | £4,830 | £2,800 |
| Cleaning | £250 | £250 |
| Electricity | £294 | £294 |
| Management | £1,171 | £300 (estimated) |
| Accountancy fees | £402 | £180 |
| General repairs | £800 | £800 |
| Total | £9,509 | £5,154 |
| Saving | £4,355 (45.8%) |
Even with a genuine cost included for the software itself, rather than assuming self-management is free, the saving still comes to nearly half the annual bill.
Building B: two years of comparison
This building's leaseholders had two years of managing agent budgets to compare against the real cost of self-managing the same services.
| Service | Agent budget 2024 | Agent budget 2025 | Self-managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountancy | £330 | £450 | £80 |
| Management fee | £2,100 | £2,207 | £0 |
| Property insurance | £5,650 | £5,650 | £4,200 |
| Insurance re-valuation | £660 | £0 | £166 |
| Fire alarm maintenance | £700 | £700 | £350 |
| Fire risk assessment | £695 | £550 | £99 |
| EICR | £175 | £175 | £175 |
| Communal electricity | £650 | £400 | £280 |
| Communal cleaning | £290 | £290 | £290 |
| Repairs and maintenance | £2,000 | £2,000 | £2,000 |
| Total | £13,250 | £12,422 | £7,645 |
| Saving | 42.3% | 38.4% |
A few things stand out once it's laid out this way. The management fee, over £2,100 a year, disappears in this building's comparison, because there's no longer a party being paid specifically to coordinate the other line items. Property insurance is noticeably lower self-managed, even before shopping around for a better rate.
A few line items, like communal cleaning and repairs, stay exactly the same, because they're genuinely the cost of the actual work rather than a markup.
Why the gap exists
None of this means every managing agent is overcharging, or that self-managing is right for every building. Some agents do a genuinely good job, and self-managing takes real time and a willingness to get involved that not every group of leaseholders wants to take on.
What these two buildings show is more structural than that. A management fee pays for coordination and admin that a self-managing group either does itself or doesn't need in the same way. Insurance is often placed through arrangements that aren't fully visible to leaseholders, and nobody may have checked in years whether a better rate is available.
Whether self-managing makes sense for your building depends on how much time your board or committee can genuinely give it, not just on the numbers above.
If you're ready to see your own numbers
If you already have control of your building, through a residents' management company, share of freehold, or after taking Right to Manage, the fastest way to know what self-managing could save you is to run your own real bills against this same comparison.
If you're not yet in that position, because your freeholder currently appoints your managing agent, Right to Manage may be your first step. Once you have control, this is exactly the transparent, itemised view Freehold.Pro is built to give you automatically. See how it works.
Start by pulling last year's service charge accounts and matching each line item against what's above. That single exercise usually tells you more than the headline total ever did.