When ownership is an eye opener

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Ownership is an eye opener in the Czech Republic. I refer here not to the general possessions and shackles that accumulate with time but to my ownership of a flat in a large house.

That status has given me membership of the owners’ committee which manages the overall upkeep of the place and common areas. I should point out that this includes a shop rented out on the ground floor and some office space on the top floors where I have rarely ventured. So there is more than just the cleaning of stairs and a new lick of paint to talk about.

I have so far attended two of these meetings. In the first I think I was regarded as an idiot who did not really know what was going on. It might have been untrue then but was certainly true at the latest meeting. I had missed one get together in the meantime and found that fairly major building work had been hatched on another piece of the building I had barely noticed.

Photo: Archive of Radio Prague
But I was not the only person in the dark about some aspects of the deal. The estimate for the work was totally new as was the somewhat surprising stipulation from the builders that the go ahead should be given for work to start almost immediately. I think it has probably started as I write.

That proposal from the committee chairwoman sent one fellow owner ballistic. A pugnacious woman, both in appearance and action, was angry, very angry. Her understandable outburst concerned the fact that no second estimate for the work had been sought to compare the price.

The chairwoman was, or acted, offended, saying she did not have time to seek out builders’ bids. The 90-minute row ended with a climb down from the bulldog fellow owner but with the concession that more than one bid should be sought in the future.

I had at one stage suggested that a building expert could look over the sole offer quickly and give an opinion on the price if that was all that was needed. They gave the impression I was speaking Chinese rather than Czech. As the row developed, I reflected that this was the sort of scenario played out at a bigger level when major tenders are handed out by the Czech government.

The experience of my girlfriend, the chairwoman of such an owners’ committee at another house in another town, has confirmed that suspicion. She was surprised to be elected to the post and even more surprised when she started looking at the committee papers. Or rather, the lack of them.

There were no full bank statements, no bills or accounts and no real paper trail from the previous chairman. It should be pointed out that the previous chairman was a builder. He had contracted his company to do some major work on the property for a tidy sum before he sold up his flat and moved on. There was of course no second offer, and the repayments on the work are now so heavy that there is nothing left over for emergencies and other pressing work.