Now im really p****d off. :(

[SparklePrincess]

We agreed a sale on my house a month ago, then 3 weeks ago on a place to buy. However my EA are still yet to forward a memorandum of sale on to our solicitors & our buyers solicitors! This is something basic that should of been done immediately. Without it nothing can proceed! WTF is their problem? They keep fobbing me off saying "ill do it now, dont you worry" yet its still not done!

Arrgh, go into the agency and sit there until they do it!

I think im going to have to.... It doesn't help that the EA is 25 minutes away & the solicitors an hour away!!! :(

I had to come over all aggressive to our solicitor when we were buying this place. I wrote him a very terse letter.. Very soon afterwards he called us in, made it perfectly clear that he was Not Impressed with my tone but had now done this, this and this, and could we sign this and this. So my parting shot to him was that I didn't care HOW unimpressed he was, it had obviously worked, he had pulled his finger out and immediately done what I had been politely asking him to do for MONTHS, and if a bit of an aggressive tone was what was needed to get things moving again, so be it. Thank you.

They are insane SP, surely they want their commission?

That's cool Erebus. :) I will be at that stage very soon I fear, or dp will.

The thing is SybilBeddows, they know they pretty much have us by the balls as unless we pull out of the whole thing (which we have already invested a LOT of money in) their commission is pretty much guaranteed at some point sooner or later...

Go to the solicitors.

Sit there til they do it.

That should so it

Well the memorandum of sale finally turned up this morning, but NOTHING else has been done a month in from sale agreed. :( Looks like this is going to be a long transaction. :( They knew from the start we wanted to exchange by the end of October for school purposes too. If there are any decent solicitors out there I am yet to find one.

SP Well thats some good news, at least!

I have to say, I found the solicitors we used rubbish....not proactive at all and I - literally - was ringing them every day for a month to chase up things/answer queries and make sure the completion date was reached.

I slightly begrudged their fee to say the least

OP - are you in Kent or SE of England? (I seem to recall you might be?). If so FurleyPage is brilliant. Reasonable price too.

I am in the SE. I have already paid out over £300 for searches etc weeks ago, which have still not been done!! I went through the estate agents so called "in house" conveyancing service assuming it would be easier & less stressful. How wrong was I? I may actually call my agents tomorrow to see if we can get a refund of the money paid out so we can cut our losses & start again.... :(

I would cut your losses and get a new solicitor. They sound utterly, utterly crap. And, repeat after me - NEVER use the conveyancing service associated with the estate agents. They are renowned for their crapness.

I think we have come to that conclusion narmada. :( Dp is going to kick butt tomorrow. Although tbh I have NEVER EVER had a good experience with a solicitor, during 9 property transactions & a divorce. I have without exception found that these people make a stressful situation a million times worse than it need be. :(

A friend at work was recently handed a bill of £6,500 for the purchase - and there was her sale on top of that - from her solicitors. She had done most of the work - chasing things up, asking the right questions, providing all the details before they were requested etc. She ended up querying the bill - and had it knocked down to the initially quoted price.

I must say that I've been lucky with solicitors each time I have moved (twie) and not had the same sort of problem.

To be fair to the solicitors (and I've only had crap experiences too so there's no love lost there) it's not unusual to leave the searches until the later stages of a transaction to avoid having to pay for them if the sale falls through earlier than this.

Surely you mean £650 plus vat mistlethrush? This is what we haver been quoted for the sales transaction. Its a fixed price too im pretty sure.

I suppose that makes sense tyler80, given that they can now do them quickly online. When I first bought a place 13 years ago they were applied for immediately as it took up to 28 days for them to come through, lol. They still asked for the cash upfront though of course...

No, I really did mean £6,500. The original quote was for £1,250 I think.

How? Must be for a very expensive property I assume. How much did they pay in the end?

£6,500 For a straightforward conveyancing job??!! What a bleeding liberty!

I think someone must of made a mistake on the bill there. Even 1,250 is way excessive for a single transaction. I really hope that included VAT!!

They knew it was going to be less than straight-forward because of the need to sort out access rights for the maintenance and cleaning of windows that looked over an adjoining property. However, the boss who looked at my friend's querying of the bill agreed that things had got out of hand (!!!!) and that as no additional fees were agreed they would have to stick with their original quote.

I think it's clear they were trying to shaft your friend - we had a complicated sale recently whereby it turned out that one of the vendors was mentally incapacitated and also there was a bit of digging to be done on the ownership of a strip of land at the bottom of the garden. The conveyancing still came in at under £1000!

Did it include disbursements? Sounds like the stamp duty must be in there for it to be that much?

No, stamp duty not inc. As I said, the quote was £1,250 - which was for a complicated sale with lots of things needing checking, which wasn't too bad. Quite how the solicitor doing it managed to spend £6,500 worth of time on it I don't know.