Robert
It's gone from bad to worse
It’s gone from bad to worse, my first mistake was to listen to my estate agent referral about this so called greatest and fastest company in the UK. First of all they will give you a decent quote, but you end up paying triple, my selling fees were £2679 for selling leasehold maisonette and my buying fees £2728, for buying straightforward empty detached house freehold. They put us under great pressure and stress throughout the whole process in 6 months, making mistakes after mistakes, making us re-sending, reprinting, re-emailing,using special delivery. Constantly chasing them and stressing for replies. Last minute requests usually on Friday just before 3pm when they close and you can’t do anything, call them write them or anything until Monday and then wait till Wednesday to get some reply. Our main solicitor was Nazia Gofur,but I managed to talk to her over 6 months just 4 times, usually we were connected to her assistant Francesca, who was unbelievably incompetent to deal with our problems and most of the time loosing our conversations or sent documents. Their so called 24/7 was useless, not updated most of the time and actually creating more stress. It was usually updated after I raised problem with Francesca. Charging for unnecessary indemnity insurance and other “must have” was very common. Always giving us horror story what could have happened if we don’t follow their advice and pay extra for this and that. Basically they are very very good in money making exercises. After 6 weeks trying to buy house through them they never bothered to tell us that vendor actually haven’t signed contract yet and when they pulled out Avrillo kindly sent us so called discounted invoice(from £1200) for work they have already done £200 instead of £97 I ticked for such case. Francesca or Nazia knew about this problem,but there is cooling time 30 days so why would they bother. Francesca actually made a false statement about Stdl duty to make us pay them to fill form for us even though we planned to do it ourselves as it’s easy enough plus we could manage to do it before the deadline and therefore save us another £200+. We spoke to Francesca on 18.6.2021 Friday at 9.50am if there is everything fine and in order to complete on 21.6. and she confirmed that. Later on she send us email just before closing time that we have 3 working days to transfer outstanding money to them in the amount of £22879.20 otherwise we risk delaying completion and therefore face other charges and penalties. We were so angry, because we knew that actually they owe us over £9000, later in that evening Nazia realized her mistakes and sent us amended email confirming those £9000 + to be transferred to our account,but no apologies whatsoever. On 17.6. just 4 days to our completion they asked me to organise redemption statement with my lender, unbelievable, should that be their job. They also charged me ridiculous amount for lenders work,£360+vat on selling and even more for buying £475 which was easier and more straightforward. We have exchanged on 4.6. leaving them enough time to complete. However they charged us extra £147+vat for completing in less then 14 days, even though it was again Francesca who lost our signed documents previous week and didn’t bother to tell us until next Friday again just before closing time so we don’t have enough time to redeem her mess ups. Tried to make us to pay for chancel repair indemnity insurance,which no one knows why,as it’s been in mediaeval times and cancelled in 2013,but again they will give some horrors example how someone had to pay for church roof repairs. When we refused to pay they still charged us £8 for prearranging policy I guess. They also made us and the vendor to pay for another useless indemnity insurance ,which even their solicitor couldn’t understand why. 5 pack search became cheaper after refusing previous options?? At the end we knew that they received £200 cash back from our lender into their account, but never sent it to us until I mentioned it in Bank and sent email to my mortgage advisor confirming it was sent. Strangely enough all of a sudden I received a phone call from Avrillo that they found extra £200 on their account and would like to send it to us immediately??!?!!! All in all this company I would never recommend to anyone for being dodgy,practicing very effective money making exercises, making you feel scared, worried and stressed,lack of communication and knowledge from some solicitors and charging you even for breathing.
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