Frustrating First Time Buyer Experience
Being first time buyers, we carried out a substantial amount of research on various Conveyancers including talking to friends and family who have bought properties in the past. Convey Law were the company that we settled on. Ultimately we have nothing to compare against but the overall feeling across the, just short of, 3 month experience was frustration. LF was our Conveyancer with HB being her assistant. Contact was exclusively through email and I only ever heard HB's voice through voice mail, which all just added to the feeling of impersonality. LF's communications were always very blunt and direct, which when you're handing over thousands of pounds, the customer service element was certainly lacking. Emails responses took almost 48 hrs each time and despite not being fully informed on each stage of the buying process, we had to drag out info and continuely had to ask for explanations. No effort to try and educate when LF knew we were First Time buyers. Our sellers were really keen to make a quick sale, which we were happy with too, but it was all very glacial. LF went on leave I think 3 times during our period but on each occasion, whoever picked up her workload was fairly prompt, which was helpful (mainly HB, as well as KW). All documents were provided promptly and we tried to be proactive and efficient at every stage but as soon as it went into Convey Law, things just slowed. Additional costs were never really fully explained when challenged, and were a surprise in most instances. A warning to anyone using Forces Help to Buy with Convey Law, you'll be charged extra (+VAT) just for them to send a couple of emails because we did 90% of the engagement, chasing, and associated paperwork when dealing with the MoD elements. Finally, when we received our final completion statement, LF tried deducting our mortgage product fee from the total we had settled meaning we were potentially having to stump up for an unplanned £995, despite being advised that the fee was being added to the mortgage and would be absorbed into the monthly payments. The response was, this is the way she's done this before with Virgin and so this is the approach going to be taken. Not taking no for an answer, we reached out to our mortgage case manager who couldn't have been more helpful and completely agreed with our interpretation of the process. It took for our case manager to get written evidence from Virgin to be fed back to LF, for her to adjust the completion statement. Fortunately, this avoided paying an extra £995 when there was no requirement too, and potentially a lengthy refund process when it all eventually became apparent. To add, communications did speed up when there was exchange of funds involved...of course. Hopefully, we wont be needing a solicitor anytime soon after recently purchasing a property but if we're honest, I would be hesitant to use Convey Law's services again unfortunately.
