Manager or professional housing community manager - which is better?

The Law on Housing and Building Maintenance from 2016 was introduced by a new institute - Professional Manager. These changes affected the tenants and created doubts. Who is a Professional Manager? How is it chosen? Will this service be charged extra to the tenants? These questions were asked by all and many remain unclear to this day.

In order to solve these doubts once and for all, our lawyer tried to clarify and answer the questions.

Who is the building housing manager and will it affect the building tenants?

Most of the buildings used to have a president assembly of tenants. The president of the tenants' assembly was usually one of the tenants of the building, who was most interested in arranging and maintaining the building and to whom the other tenants entrusted this function. After Law adoption it was called the housing manager which is elected by the housing community assembly from among their members. His term of office is four years, but it can be dismissed by an assembly decision or he can resign on his own. 

The manager represents the building and takes all necessary legal actions on its behalf. As the Law stipulates the obligation to register housing communities in the Register of Housing Communities, the manager is obliged to perform all necessary actions regarding this registration. Manager is obliged to keep records of all special, common and independent parts of the building, all owners and tenants. Also, the manager's job is to manage and dispose of the funds from the current account of the building, of course not independently but on the basis of the decision of the housing community, to which he is responsible for his work. In the end, what he usually does is organize works on common parts of the building and the land around the building, as well as emergency interventions.

Who is the professional housing manager and how does it affect the tenants?

Function of a Professional housing manager who manages buildings is a completely new function which was created by this Law.

The housing community may decide to entrust the management of the building to a professional manager or if a building is left without a manager and does not elect a new one, the city or municipality can assign a professional manager. It will perform management tasks until the housing association makes a decision on the selection of the manager or concludes a contract on professional management.

Business management activities can be performed by companies or entrepreneurs (professional management organizer) through a person who has a license to perform the activities of a professional manager and is registered in the register of professional managers by the Serbian Chamber of Commerce.

Professional manager is entitled to a building management fee. If the housing association decides to hire a professional manager, the amount of compensation is determined by the contract concluded with him. If the municipality forcibly appoints a professional housing manager, they can determine the amount for his work.

We can conclude that the housing manager or professional manager is someone to whom all tenants are referred, whose job is to take all the necessary actions to make the building a clean, functional, safe and pleasant place to live.

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