Conveyancer cock up - AIBU to report them and request my money back?

[joeysapple]

I remortgaged last year and paid off the Help Go Buy loan on my property. The conveyancers were TERRIBLE from start to finish and refused to acknowledge any responsibility for their total shiteness.

Now, 12 months later, I'm selling my property and my conveyancer (different conveyancer, of course!) has tried to get office copies from the Land Registry, only to be told by Land Reg that they have an outstanding requisition with conveyancer no. 1, and despite three letters from Land Reg this remains outstanding.

Thus, my new mortgage is not actually registered, and my old mortgage and help to buy loan are still registered against my property 12 months later!

I've contacted conveyancer no.1 and they have tried to blame Help to Buy and the Land Registry and havent apologised.

At no point have they told me this work is still outstanding and god knows how long it could now take to sort. I want to go to the ombudsmen and request a refund of the £1300 fee I paid them. Am I being dramatic about this? It's really, really pissed me off and I've lost my cool with them big time today.

Lodge a complaint with the governing body. I can’t think who it is off the top of my head. But you should definitely have some recourse.

I assume the SRA is who you should contact about this?

Write letter of complaint to the firm’s complaints manager/partner detailing the problems and asking they sort registrations urgently, keep you updated and refund your fee in compensation. Say if they refuse you will make complaint to Legal Ombudsman.

If they refuse make online complaint to Legal Ombudsman which is a simple step by step process on their website. Good luck!

I'd echo what pp said. Start with the firms official complaints process. Then if they don't resolve, you can go to their regulatory body.

I will say though, getting a HTB charge taken off is an absolute bastard to deal with.

I have emailed all the partners and made clear I'm not happy. I've asked them for a detailed timeline of what's happened and when so I can be clear it's definitely their fault, which I strongly suspect it is. It's fucking outrageous that they haven't bothered to keep me informed or even make me aware that this still isn't sorted.

Thanks, not sure if it would be SRA or legal ombudsman but will look into it.

They haven't even apologised yet so I doubt they will be forthcoming with a refund but I'm going to try my damndest, absolute bunch of cowboys!

Given they have been so crap this may not help, but if conveyancer 1 tells the Land Registry that you have agreed a sale of your property, the Land Registry can deem the delay as causing you financial hardship and expedite the original application. Of course, this would mean conveyancer 1 would have to actually deal with the requisition the Land Registry have raised .

Sorry you’ve had such a bad experience. The Land Registry are swamped at the moment, but this does sound entirely like conveyancer 1 has just sat on the requisition for months!

Hello. Comm Prop Solicitor here 😀

HTB are an awful government department to deal with. Of course I could be wrong, but I’ll bet the requisition concerns something with them like a certificate for the Land Registry etc or the paperwork (usually called a DS1 or DS3 Signed to remove the charge against your property) that wouldn’t issue until it all happened, then you can’t get through to speak to someone and just go to a call centre when you try to chase.

The Land Registry also more or less completely closed through lockdown and switched off their phone lines and I’ll bet HTB did.

Not excusing the conveyancer if they are rubbish and they should have called out of courtesy and explained the issue.

As I’m in Commercial I don’t deal with your side, but we often act for small scale property developers who decided to do the HTB scheme on their development and it was so difficult with undertakings we could never fulfil (Due to HTB refunding to confirm things etc) that we just started turning the work down!!

And by the way you won’t be able to go to the ombudsman etc until you have exhausted their internal complaints procedure so do this before you make a complaint as they’ll just refer your back. Good luck keep us updated!

Use the firm's complaints procedure then if you're not happy with the outcome complain to the legal services ombudsman. It will cost them more than £1300 to respond to the complaint. Might not sort it out but might cover the cost of someone else sorting it out for you

I'm a legal assistant and to be fair it can take a while for registration to take place. I'm in NI so it'll be a bit different but as pp said the delay can be caused by the charge owner (in this case HTB) being slow to provide what they have been asked for.
There's absolutely no way in our place you'd get any sort of apology. And definitely not a refund! By all means make a complaint to law society to get the solicitor to get a move on but they will be able to bluff their way out of any blame for the delay. As someone mentioned above... lockdown and covid cover a multitude of sins in any office these days.

From what I can gather, the Land reg sent a requisition to conveyancer no.1 in January, followed by a "warning of cancellation" in February and then a further letter in August.

Conveyancer has blamed H2B for taking a long time to get them the discharge document, and now backlogs at Land Registry. But this doesn't really fit with Land Reg telling conveyancer no. 2 that they sent three letters chasing conveyancer no.1! And even so.... a year, seriously?

It doesn't help that the conveyancer received my forms and left them unprocessed for three weeks, took 8 days to reply to an email, reviewed the file for completion, told me it was ready and then immediately before completion realised my valuation had expired due to their delays and on completion date tried to get me to pay £850 more than was actually due. I don't have that much faith in the conveyancer after all that. I really ought to go to trustpilot, having typed all that out. I think when it was done previously I was just so relieved I'd never have to deal with them again. Or so I thought

@user1471543094

I'm a legal assistant and to be fair it can take a while for registration to take place. I'm in NI so it'll be a bit different but as pp said the delay can be caused by the charge owner (in this case HTB) being slow to provide what they have been asked for. There's absolutely no way in our place you'd get any sort of apology. And definitely not a refund! By all means make a complaint to law society to get the solicitor to get a move on but they will be able to bluff their way out of any blame for the delay. As someone mentioned above... lockdown and covid cover a multitude of sins in any office these days.

That’s really disappointing to hear. If my firm had been so unhelpful and uncommunicative with a client I’d be extremely disappointed in the fee earner who had dealt with it. There is a balance between invalidating your insurance by admitting culpability and basic decent manners and client care. I can’t bear lockdown being used as an excuse for performance that would have been rubbish anyway.

This really isn’t your problem as the client I agree. But when you have live cases, getting a req then getting a notice of a cancellation isn’t a huge deal, it just means you haven’t got to it yet.

You can apply for an extension. I’m not being dismissive it’s not acceptable really, but £1,300 is nothing really to the actual work that goes into Conveyancing compared to charging £250.00 an hour plus VAT for family advice.

We have plot sales that take hugely disproportionate amounts of time. Our res con dept don’t even time record as we do it fixed fee.

Of course I repeat as the customer none of this is your problem, I’m just explaining the realities of Conveyancing.

HintofVintage...I completely agree with you. I know it's not right.
The covid excuse particularly grates on me as well. I've heard it alot recently.

I spoke to Land Registry today as I'm still getting nowhere with the fuckwit conveyancers. The land registry wrote to my conveyancers on 3 August. My conveyancer didn't respond until 20 October, nearly 3 months later and coincidentally the date I first complained. Their Managing Partner in charge of their complaints has still yet to send me a single email of acknowledgement.

If anyone wants to know the name of a national Conveyancing firm to avoid at all costs, please feel free to PM me

@joeysapple did you get sorted? Just curious

Hint of vintage How many live clients do you have and what area of the country are you in. It makes a difference. Here in Brighton we have more estate agent kick backs than anywhere else in the country. I know of only 2 law firms that refuse to pay for work and 3 estate agents in the whole city that do not require it. Some estate agents are refusing to sell properties to potential buyers if they are using one of the non paying solicitors. They also lie up and down the chain about the non paying conveyancers performance. Some conveyancers in Brighton have over 200 live matters and are being actively harassed and a large percentage of them. It is enough of a thankless task and all decent law firms should try and unite in not paying agents and ending up in their pockets. Unfortunately one has to question how many decent firms there are? If you are using a law firm to do your conveyancing ask if the are paying referral fees to any agents and if they are not you have found yourself a decent firm. As I said only 2 or 3 in Brighton. Ask the agent if they are.paid referral fees and they have to tell you and also advise how much they get. Never market you house with an agent that gets paid by the lawyer. There is a conflict if interest.