Estate representative organisations have been ringing the alarm bell for a few years already: Belgium needs more and more “syndics” to match increasing demand.
These facility managers attached to estate owners’ associations are essential for a smooth management of residential buildings. However their image suffers from a bad reputation in the population both in the media and among the communities of state owners and tenants, who don’t necessarily understand their role and duties.
A survey in 2022 from the estate agents regulating body, the Institut Professionnel des Agents immobiliers (IPI-BIV) among its members registered as ‘syndic’ showed that 72% of the respondents had to deal with issues other than those related to their core mission.
“This shows a misunderstanding of the role and competences of the syndic” quoted Le Cri, the newsletter of the national organisation of estate owners (SNPC-NEMS).
The article added that 81% of the respondents acknowledged that the syndic have a bad image among the general population. By extent, only half of the syndics responding agreed with the fact that their work is recognised and appreciated by landlords.
Don’t ask too much
The role and duties of the Syndic is enshrined in Belgium’s Civil Code which regulates common civil proceedings. It states first of all that the syndic only deals with common parts of buildings, not private ones. And this is perhaps where most misunderstandings comes from.
“We have to explain it tirelessly to landlords and it’s a huge source of waste of time through endless telephone and email conversation,” says Felix de Thier, Head of Jacquemin Syndic in Wavre.
The Civil Code lists no less than 16 duties to be accomplished by the syndic, including: execute the decisions of the Owners’s Assembly; manage the owners’ collective funds; communicate the debts statements regarding building charges; ensure thorough bookkeeping for the accounts; propose several quotes to help the owners’ assembly to decide on a supplier; and ensure a smooth transmission of archives to a successor.
To fulfill those tasks, the syndic can count on its address book. “It took me years to build a suppliers' network. It’s a hell of a job to select trades,” says André Pakulski, estate owner and non-professional syndic in a building in Ixelles.
“Owners want quotes for anything, we have to follow up. But we have to be careful to make everyone happy and not get a reputation of ‘traders of quotes’ for suppliers, since good ones are rare to find,” adds de Thier.
Swiss knife
For him, “you are a Swiss knife for the buildings you manage, like a general practitioner: you must know all the domains relative to your buildings.”
Syndics are indeed an essential cog for the management of a building. They have to deal either with maintenance (cleaning of common premises, curettage of sewage pipes, etc.) and more complex issues regarding renovation works (roof, façade, energy performance), but also emergency situations such as floods, fires, lift breakdown, etc. … and anger management.
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Dealing with an owners’ assembly “is like driving a team of horses which run at different speed: some have to be kept in the centre, others have to bet on the sides,” says Pakulski. “Grumblers are the most voiceful owners in an assembly, it would help a lot if sometimes syndics could count on the support of the - too silent - majority,” adds Patrick Willems, Secretary-general of SNPC-NEMS.
For him, the syndic’s tasks should be fulfilled as “a team work with the owners’ assembly” since when the owners’ show interest in launching works to maintain the building, “the syndic follows up”. Otherwise, the risk is disinvolvement, i.e. a passive syndic which does not ignite the necessary works and waits patiently for the annual assembly to tell him or her what to do. “The involvement of owners is capital for the success of a syndic’s mission,” Willems concludes.
Shortage in view
However, this is a best-case scenario for a community of landlords, because the profession has evolved a lot over time. Statistics are impossible to establish because the role of a syndic can be fulfilled by many professions, each regulated by their own Order: estate agents (regulated by IPI-BIV and by far the biggest number), lawyers, chartered accountants, chartered surveyors, notaries, architects and even non-professional ones for very small buildings.
Hence nobody knows the exact number of acting syndics in Belgium but only the estate agents registered as such: 612 ‘pure’ syndics and 2,023 which also act as estate agents. Their number, drops year after year, while the number of apartment buildings has been increasing steadily in the country.
On top of that, competition is shrinking among the sector. “We are experiencing a concentration leading to ‘mastodons’ managing thousands of apartments,” says Willems. Hence you lose a more personal relationship with the owners and an ‘industrialisation’ of services. “I don’t see human-size syndics emerging,” he laments. The relationship with their owners, traditionally very personal, is lost for the benefit of efficiency.
“I can perfectly imagine a 50-year old syndic owner, tired with either increasingly demanding landlords and regulations, giving up and selling the business to a much bigger player where he or she would stay as an employee. Thus cashing in and enjoying a reduced portfolio to manage with less involvement.” But the SNPC-NEMS’s feedback from estate owners is “disappointment” for the loss of quality of service.
Improving work-life balance
Hence all representative organisations of the sector decided to launch in 2023 a still-going campaign to improve the image and the status of syndics among estate agents to attract newcomers.
It was based on the findings of the IPI-BIV survey of 2022 cited above. On top of informing on the essential role of a syndic in managing buildings, the campaign voices also one of the main concerns by the syndic themselves: work-life balance.
The survey found out that for a majority of syndics, the job demands so much energy and time that it impacts negatively their private life. “Holding general assemblies of landlords in the evening is perhaps part of the problem,” quotes the SNPC-NEMS’s newsletter article on the subject.
“At some point, we should perhaps wonder whether holding the assemblies at 8pm may eventually discourage people to do this job,” Willems points out.
Stress and salary are also a repellent, according to the survey, leading to physical exhaustion, for more or less half of the respondents. One of the main issues is related to conflicts with their clients, who don’t understand the role of syndics, limited to common issues. “You cannot demand top-quality service for peanuts, all the more in a context of shortage,” the article concludes.
