If you own an apartment in Cyprus it's likely that you've seen one of my many articles on Facebook or in local magazines or either on my online resource www.CyprusCommunalGuide.com

A very common question I receive is why I decided to do this, why I decided to provide the benefit of my years of experience in managing buildings for free.  To explain this I need to give you a little bit about my background.

My name is Russell Flick and I've been professionally managing apartments and resorts in Cyprus for over ten years during this time I've experienced most if not all types of building or committee developer debtors or just generally apartment owners.

I've always been frustrated that a very few unscrupulous people have taken advantage of people's lack of knowledge about the regulations that are there in place to protect them.  There's a popular misconception that they just simply can't be enforced but this misconception is usually spread by those who are taking advantage of the owners that don't know their rights.  Whether it's a developer who doesn't want the owners to form a committee because they're worried about losing the contract of the management of that building, a management company that wants to find excuses for poor performance or their general inability to do their job properly because they don't know how to effectively use the regulations and resources, or it could simply be an owner that doesn't want to pay their fees and want to keep getting away with it.

This has always been really frustrating to me as whenever I'm speaking to clients I find that I spend more time correcting all of this misinformation then I do speaking about our particular services or how we can help them and even worse, I hear of owners that are unwilling to use the benefit of professional help and advice because all they've ever heard up to this point is lies and misinformation.

This lack of information is self-perpetuating, with the poor information available it's quite common for a committee to be set up without following the requirements set out within the law or maybe they don't keep the accounts records correctly or they calculated the voting rights incorrectly.

While these are easy to avoid mistakes if they're made it makes it much harder to use the law, so for example if you're taking a property owner to court for not paying their charges their lawyer will use things like this as part of their defence. I recognize that things needed to change, and I thought if I can help do this, I should.  

I started writing advice articles in local magazines and newspapers I started presenting the seminars making videos publishing online articles writing books and I also set up the www.CyprusCommunalGuide.com as a free online resource for apartment owners where they have one single place to go where all of this information is collected.

I'm really happy to see how popular this site has become and I'm being regularly asked to be interviewed or write articles for other publications, speak at large seminars and generally help owners who are in trouble. I already see a change in the way people are thinking and this itself is its own reward I plan to keep working on this project until the negative attitude people have about owning apartments is a thing of the past however long that type