By getting involved, you could get a lot more from your management company, says Marc Coleman

My experience with management companies has, to date, not been bad. I have also discovered two golden rules of dealing with them. When I owned a city centre apartment an annual fee of €1,400 (still too much in my opinion but relatively low) gave me the services of a management company that was well run and professional. Friday's partygoer vomit (not mine) was gone from the corridor by Saturday. Litter vanished within hours of appearance.

Troublesome neighbours, too, were cowed into civic mindedness by stern letters of warning. In many ways management companies are like mini-governments. For the annual cost of leasing a small car, they do collectively what we as individuals cannot or will not; clean up corridors, fix lifts and stop the neighbours from playing heavy metal until 2am. And like governments, management impose taxes - or management fees as they call them.

The first golden rule in dealing with management companies arises when deciding which apartment to buy (or when deciding whether to get an apartment or a house); capitalise the value of the fee and add it to the price of the property you are thinking of buying.

A rough rule of thumb in doing this is to take your present or prospective mortgage rate and divide that rate by a hundred and divide the annual management fee by the resultant number. Ball park, the number that pops out measures the capital cost of paying the fee ad infinitum.

On its own, it's just a notional number. Its usefulness comes in comparing the prices of various properties you are thinking of buying. For example, suppose you're considering the purchase of one of two apartments both equally attractive in their different ways, but one costs €300,000 and the other €310,000. The first one has a management fee of €1,800, the second of €1,200.

Now, suppose you have inspected the communal areas in both and see no difference in the quality of service. Take the difference in the fee of €600 and divide it by 0.5 (assume a long-term mortgage rate of 5 per cent) to give you €12,000, making the second apartment a marginally better buy.

Technically speaking, management companies are like governments in one further respect: you can out at the next election (the election for the board, that is) in pretty much the same way as you can a government of a country.

Here management companies are suffering from the same "bowling alone" phenomenon of falling civic mindedness.

In the same way that no one gets active in political parties any more, few people get agitated enough about small slip-ups in company performance to spend a wet February weekend talking about foyer design and bin charges (and, by the way, if you do meet someone who likes this sort of thing run very fast in the opposite direction).

This brings us to the second golden rule: turn a necessity into a pleasure. Attend at least your first meeting and get a few neighbours to go with you.

After the meeting adjourn to the nearest pub. Better still, ensure the meeting takes place in the pub. As well as keeping an eye on your fees and what you get for them, the few beers and a bit of politicking could turn the event from a chore into entertainment.

And you never know, you might even rediscover the magic we used to know before apartments were ever heard of in this country; community spirit.

• Marc Colemanis Economics Editor of The Irish Times