The old manager's parting gift arrived two months after we'd said goodbye: an invoice for January heating, unverifiable, with a note scrawled in pen. We paid it, because arguing cost more than the invoice. It sits above my desk now, a small monument.
When our Āgenskalns building decided, after twelve years, that "the manager will look at it next week" was no longer an acceptable response to a leaking basement, the board spent almost a year just thinking about changing companies. Not doing. Thinking. The fear was legal fog — contracts, courts, some clause nobody had read since 2009.
It turned out to be mostly paperwork. Latvian law on this is surprisingly orderly. The traps are practical, not legal, and I'll point out all three of them.
The legal part, minus the drama
Latvia's Law on Residential Property Management (Dzīvojamo māju pārvaldīšanas likums) doesn't chain anyone to their manager. Three things are worth knowing before anything else:
Any side can leave with three months' written notice. The law allows a management agreement to be ended unilaterally with three months' written notice. Your manager can do it to you; you can do it to them. No court, no cause needed — just the letter and the clock.
Replacing the manager is an owners' meeting decision, not a board decision. Choosing and removing the manager sits with the meeting of apartment owners, decided by simple majority of owners present or represented once the meeting is quorate. One loud board member cannot do it alone, however persuasive the WhatsApp polling gets.
The building's documents belong to the building. The technical passport, schematics, keys, meter records — these are the house's, not the outgoing company's. If a manager goes silent about handing them over, Latvian courts do order handovers. In practice it rarely gets that far: a registered letter with a deadline usually does the work.
That's most of the law. Now for the part where buildings actually suffer.
The meeting: count your shares before you book the room
Quorum kills more manager changes than bad managers do. For the meeting to be competent, owners holding more than half of the building's shares must take part — in person, by proxy, or in writing. In our five-building association that meant months of politely collecting signed proxy papers from pensioners, and discovering three flats whose owners had emigrated decades ago. Ever tried tracking down whoever bought a flat in 2004? Neither had we, until March.
Two moves saved us. First: call the meeting at least two weeks ahead, in writing, with a fixed agenda — "manager question" scribbled on a napkin is not an agenda, and courts notice. Second: if the room falls short on the night, fall back to written voting, where every owner gets a ballot at home and the count happens on paper. Slower. Reliable.
Also — put the new manager's draft agreement on the same agenda. Two meetings mean two quorums, and nobody sane volunteers for that twice.
The notice letter: small, boring, crucial
The termination letter to the old manager should be boring beyond suspicion. One page: the building's address, the date and minutes reference of the meeting decision, the intent to end the management agreement, the three-month date, and a request to prepare documents and a final settlement. Registered mail, copy kept.
This letter also starts the clock on the outgoing manager's arithmetic — the closing bill for services, plus reconciliation of anything over- or under-collected during the year. Expect weeks. Expect it to take longer than weeks, frankly.
The handover list
When the new company took over the panel house we look after in Purvciems, we walked them through the basement with this list. Steal it:
- Technical passport and building schematics — heating, water, electrical.
- Keys. All of them. Ask specifically about the roof, the boiler room, the meter cabinet, and the attic hatch that officially "doesn't exist".
- Individual and building meter readings, recorded, with dates.
- Copies of every active contract — heat, gas, electricity, water, waste, lift maintenance, fire alarm service.
- Owner register with shares and contact details. Mind GDPR here: personal data is moving between two data handlers, so put the handover itself in writing.
- Billing and payment history per apartment for the last 24 months. Not 12. Arrears you don't check at handover become arrears you inherit fully.
- Bank details and signing mandates — who signs what, on which accounts.
- The open defects list — everything the old manager promised to fix "next week".
Number eight is my favourite. In 2019 a colleague's association discovered during handover that their electricity supply contract had drifted, years earlier, to a supplier nobody remembered choosing, at a rate nobody remembered approving. A quiet €40/month gift, running for years.
Trap one: the gap where nobody bills
Every transition has a seam — usually one to two months where responsibility for billing is genuinely ambiguous. Somebody has to pay the heat supplier for February. If the old manager assumes the new one has it, and the new one assumes the old one did, you're three weeks from late-payment penalties on a supply contract.
The fix is embarrassingly simple. Pick one month, write it down — "old manager closes January, new manager opens February" — and give both sides each other's phone numbers. Suppliers learn about your divorce from the mail, not the grapevine.
Trap two: the double invoice
See monument, above desk. An outgoing manager bills the services of its last full month after the new manager has already billed the same month. Two invoices for one February, and both technically "correct".
Prevention: at the meeting where you approve the change, also approve a final reconciliation date in writing. If a late invoice lands after it, you have a document saying exactly which side was supposed to bill what. Without it, you have a €300 argument and a very patient accountant.
Trap three: hiring in a panic
Boards that spent a year dithering suddenly want a signed contract by Friday, and they grab the first offer that lands. Slow down exactly here. Ask candidates three questions, in writing: the per-square-metre fee and whether VAT sits inside that number (offers I've seen for Riga's panel buildings run roughly €0.60–€1.20/m² depending on what's included); who exactly fields resident complaints during working hours; and a sample monthly report from another building they manage.
The report matters more than the price. A cheap manager whose accounting is a fog teaches residents to stop trusting the whole association. I'd rather pay €0.95/m² for readable numbers than €0.70 for mystery.
A note for Estonian readers
Estonia does this differently. Most Tallinn buildings live inside a korteriühistu — the association runs the house itself, with a board carrying the load and hired caretakers or service firms around it. "Changing the manager" there usually means re-tendering individual contracts — cleaning, maintenance, energy — rather than swapping one company for another. The general meeting appoints and removes the board that holds those contracts, and Estonian association law gives that meeting the same kind of control the Latvian law gives owners over managers. So if you're reading from Tartu wondering why your version feels simpler: it is simpler, mostly because you are the manager.
Which is both a relief and, on bad weeks, a complaint about the weight on the board's shoulders. But that's another article.
