Last spring, our building's board spent four months trying to fire a property manager. Not because anything dramatic happened — no stolen money, no scandal. Just the slow accumulation of small failures: utility bills that arrived three weeks late, a roof leak reported in October and "fixed" in March, and a residents' meeting where the manager's report was, and I quote, "the attached PDF."
Firing them still took us 71 days and cost about €1,200 we did not expect to pay.
If your association in Riga is in the same place — tired, but unsure what the agreement actually allows — here's what I wish someone had told us before we started. One caveat before we dig in: I'm a board member, not a lawyer. Everything below is what our experience taught us, cross-checked against Latvian law where I could. For your building, one hour of a lawyer's time is cheaper than a mistake.
First, find your agreement. Yes, the actual paper.
This sounds obvious. It is not.
In our building, the "agreement" was a 2019 contract signed by three people, two of whom had moved abroad. Nobody currently on the board had read it. When we finally printed it out and sat down with coffee, we found things that changed our entire plan.
Here's what to look for, in rough order of importance:
The notice period. Most Latvian management agreements run with a 3-6 month notice period. Ours said 6 months — in writing, delivered by registered mail. Six months. We started the process in February and the switch happened in September. If I'd known this in January, we'd have started in January.
Automatic renewal clauses. This is the one that bites people. Some agreements say the contract "automatically extends for successive 12-month periods unless either party gives notice at least 3 months before the end date." Miss that window and you're locked in for another year. Check your end date today, put the deadline in your shared calendar with three reminders, and thank me later.
Handover obligations. What does the agreement say the manager must give the next one? Accounting records? As-built documentation? Meter readings history? Our agreement mentioned "documentation" generically, which our outgoing manager interpreted — creatively — as a single PDF of annual reports. Everything else, we had to reconstruct from the apartment files residents kept.
Termination penalties. Some agreements include "early termination fees" if you exit before a minimum term. Ours didn't, but we did get an invoice for €1,200 in "archival and document preparation services." Whether we legally owed that is a question I'll get to.
The law on your side: what Latvia actually regulates
Latvia's approach to residential property management is more specific than most people assume. The key piece of legislation is the Law on Residential Property Management (Dzīvo telpu pārvaldības likums), and it has real teeth on the switching question.
Two provisions matter most:
Your right to change managers exists regardless of what the agreement says. The law recognizes that an apartment owners' association (dzīvokļu īpašnieku apvienība — a flat owners' association) is not hostage to a management contract. Where a building operates under an association, the association's meeting — not the manager — holds the power. A properly convened general meeting can decide to terminate the management arrangement and appoint another one.
The manager has handover duties. The law expects the outgoing manager to hand over the documentation necessary for the new manager to continue managing the building — technical documentation, accounting records, meter data. "Necessary" is doing some work in that sentence, but the principle is on your side: a manager cannot hold your building's own paperwork hostage because you fired them.
If you're in Estonia instead, the legal landscape differs — there Estonia's Apartment Ownership Act (Korteriomandiseadus) governs, and boards generally have somewhat more explicit statutory levers. The practical advice below still applies, but check the Estonian specifics with someone local.
One more Latvian wrinkle: some buildings don't have an association at all — they operate under individual agreements between each owner and the manager (or "apartment manager," dzīvokļu apsaimniekotājs in the legal wording). If that's your building, the switching process runs owner-by-owner, which is messier. The 2021 amendments to the management rules pushed most buildings toward the association model precisely to fix this chaos.
The process, step by step — and where we messed up
Here's the sequence that works. I've annotated it with our own mistakes so you can skip them.
Step 1: Get the facts together before you announce anything. Billing delays, unanswered emails, maintenance failures — document them with dates. We spent one evening building a shared folder and it became the backbone of every later conversation. Boards that walk into a "we want a change" meeting with only vibes get walked over.
Step 2: Check the agreement's notice mechanics again. Registered mail? Board resolution? Both? Our agreement required the notice to come "from the association" — which our lawyer read as requiring a meeting decision first, then the letter. That sequencing mattered: the manager's initial response to our letter was "the board has no authority to send this without a meeting decision."
Step 3: Convene the general meeting properly. In Latvia, the notice, agenda and quorum rules for association meetings are strict — mess them up and the decision is challengeable. Our first attempt failed on a technicality: we sent the notice by email, which was fine, but one of the annexes didn't open properly for several owners. Nobody contested it, but we re-ran the vote at the next meeting anyway because we wanted a clean result. Aim for boring and correct, not fast and fragile.
Step 4: Line up the new manager BEFORE the meeting. Do not pass "Go" without this. Our biggest near-mistake was scheduling a termination vote without a confirmed replacement. A building with no manager — even for a month — means nobody sends the heating cost statements, nobody pays the elevator maintenance invoice, and the bank account signature questions pile up fast. We had two candidate managers present their terms to the board in January, and the eventual winner came with references from two buildings in a similar house type.
Step 5: Send the notice by the book. Registered mail, physical copies, delivery receipts kept. Yes, in 2026. Email "for awareness" in parallel, but the paper trail is what counts if this ever gets disputed.
Step 6: Run the handover like a project, not a favor. Make a list: accounting records, bank account details and signatory changes, utility supplier contracts, meter reading history, as-built files, keys and access codes, ongoing repair warranties. Put dates and owners on each line. Our outgoing manager was polite but slow; the things that actually moved the needle were (a) the bank signatory change, which took 3 weeks at the bank itself, and (b) the historical meter data, which took 5 weeks and several escalating emails.
The €1,200 question: what can a manager legally charge at exit?
Ah yes. The invoice.
Four weeks after our termination notice, the outgoing manager sent an invoice: €1,200 for "archival services and document systematization." Attached was a price list we'd never seen, dated two years after our contract was signed.
Our position, which our lawyer supported: charges at handover must be either (a) provided for in the agreement or (b) justified as actual, documented services the manager performed at the association's request. A price list invented after the fact, for services nobody ordered, fails both tests. We asked for itemization. The itemization described scanning documents that — under the law's handover provisions — the manager is obliged to hand over anyway.
We negotiated it down to €400 and paid it. Not because I'm sure we owed even that, but because four hours of lawyer time to save €800 is a bad trade, and the new manager was already three weeks into onboarding and needed the meter data. Sometimes you pay the "go away" fee and move on. Boards should know that's a legitimate strategic choice, not a defeat.
What the first 90 days with the new manager should look like
A quick checklist for after the switch, since nobody talks about this part:
Weeks 1-2: Opening balance meeting. The new manager inherits mid-year accounting — make sure opening balances for the bank account, receivables and payables are agreed in writing between old and new. This is where most disputes in the following year actually come from, not from the switch itself.
Weeks 3-6: First utility billing cycle. Sit in on it. Not to hover — to learn where the new team's process differs from what residents are used to. Ours moved the payment deadline from the 10th to the 15th, which sounds trivial until you realize 40 residents had standing orders set to the 9th.
Weeks 7-12: The "does this actually work" review. Response times to resident requests, quality of the maintenance coordination, whether the monthly reports are actually arriving. Put real metrics on it if you can. Ours: average email response time went from 6 days to under 2. That alone made the whole switch worth it.
The honest summary
Switching a property manager in Latvia is a paperwork-heavy, calendar-driven, emotionally tedious process. It is not complicated. It just punishes improvisation.
Read the agreement before you're angry. Start the calendar before you're ready. Line up the replacement before you vote. Document the handover like you're handing your building to a stranger, because — for a few weeks — you are.
And put the notice deadline in three calendars, not one. Ask me how I know.
Anna K. writes about property management and tenant life in the Baltics. She's been navigating Riga's housing cooperatives since 2019 and has now survived exactly one manager switch, which she considers a qualification.
