Everyone saw the Andy B subscription trap story this week. Leaving a service should be as easy as joining one. The same principle quietly landed in Scottish property law in April. It got almost no coverage.

Your title deeds might say you need two thirds of owners to change factor. Or 75%. Most people read that, assume it's hopeless, and stop there.

It isn't. Where the deeds set the bar higher than a simple majority, more than half of owners can now generally appoint or dismiss. Where the deeds say nothing useful, there's a majority route too. Guidance: [mygov.scot/change-property-factor](http://mygov.scot/change-property-factor)

Two things that catch people out:

**Newer builds.** If the developer wrote a manager burden into the deeds you're stuck until it runs out. Five years for most housing, three for sheltered.

**Switching isn't complaining.** You don't need to prove a Code of Conduct breach to decide you'd rather someone else did the job. That's the First-tier Tribunal, and it's a separate route entirely.

I run a factoring business here, so I'm biased. I'm not from a property background. I started it after living in a badly factored block. Been there, had the email wars.

The bit that gets almost no scrutiny is the handover. Switching your current account takes seven days and somebody else does the legwork. Changing factor should be closer to that than it is.

Instead, we've taken over developments where the outgoing factor dragged it out for months, drip fed the records and sat on owners' float money. Very little of that is clearly against the rules. It sits in a grey area nobody regulates properly, and it makes leaving slow enough that people want to give up.

Which is the actual trap.

Anyone here tried it since April? How did it go?

The subscription trap thing has a Scottish property angle nobody's mentioned