PLS Solicitors
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AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!
I have moved home now 4 times since 2016 and PLS Solicitors are by far the WORST solicitor experience I have had to date. We were appointed Craig Pollitt and majority of my experience was horrdenous. In the end I had sent 49 emails to Craig which is just ridiculous. There was hidden fees that they do not quote you on to 'buy you in' to using their services. e.g. If you were buying with a mortgage then they would charge you extra to 'ensure this is okay' regardless if you use a mortgage adviser. In this instance, we only had additional borrowing from our existing lender. This is called 'Acting for Mortgage Lender'. Our purchase price was £380k in which they charged £315.00 and £100.00 (deed of Covenant) which is not disclosed at outset. (this increases depending on how much you are borrowing!) I had asked a local solicitor to confirm what these charges might be and they couldnt comment as its not something all solicitors charge for. If it were me, 100% next time I would be using a local solicitor rather than using a panel solicitor recommended by the New Homes Group. On more than one occassion, I had to ask craig to be 'less vague' in his email responses. He failed to use terminlogy someone in their profession wouldnt understand and this had cause me extreme stress. They are not a paper friendly company and I found numerous errors on their administration, especially their portal. There were documents missing, and important ones such as the management pack and searches which I chased for, and they only noticed it wasnt there when I searched for this myself. Their portal also doesnt let you zoom out of any document so you are reading page after page at a size which is huge! I also had instructions from Craig to have multiple paperwork to be witnessed and one of the mortgage documentation (as you would expect) but Craig gave me incorrect instructions and therefore more stress of getting it witnessed for a second time. Craig also failed to remove our £9k early repayment charge on the purchase which nearly sent me to an early grave!! How can something so simple be missed, we were porting our existing mortgage and had additional borrowing for the purchase. Onto the completion day. There were 4 solicitors in this chain and PLS solicitors took 4 hours to complete their processes whilst the other solicitors took 1 hour EACH. We were homeless from 11am to when we collected the keys at 4pm on the completion day. The impression I had from Craig is that he didnt want to speak to me to give me an update. I had called 4 times for an update as they have had the money since 11am at this point, and it took me to cry down the phone to a colleague for Craig to even acknowledge my call back. I was told by a colleague Jack that 'We dont call our accounts team, we only email them. We dont know why it hasnt gone yet, 'its in a queue' Its a friday and month end so its busy for our accounts team, sorry no I cant put you through' Buying a new home should be exciting but PLS solicitors definitely did not exceed any of my expectations and I will gladly NEVER USE AGAIN....!!!