Premier Property Lawyers - Anyone used them recently?

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Just had an offer accepted on a house and are going with PPL, as recommended by our mortgage broker. We like the way everything is online and hope that the purchase is going to be straightforward. I have now read a lot of mixed reviews on the internet which have made me rethink our decision.
So my question is has anyone used them recently?
Pls give me your experiences, positive and negative!
Cheers!

Ppl emailed us again reminding us to return papers, despite us replying to the email I mentioned above. Don't seem to have their act together AT ALL!

I mean, they have emailed us today... Clearly don't manage their communications/ records very well

I am selling my flat and was advised to use PPL through my estate agent (who obviously has a back hander with them). I have been dealing with PPL since June 2014 and my advise - DO NOT USE THEM!!!

1. It took them over a week to acknowledge the Notice of Purchase.
2. I sent them all information requested and even with this, they spelt my name wrong. OK, I can live with that. However, having told them I changed my name by Depol, they wrote to me three times asking for my marriage certificate.
3. I then called to see what they needed to prove my change of status by Depol. No-one returned the call. No-one answered the emails.
4. I then sent an original certified copy of the Depol Certificate and included a note to ask them to send it back by return of post. I also emailed to ask them to do that.
5. Over 10 days went by, nothing. I complained to the CEO of the estate agency for the shocking service as they had recommended them. He tried to appease me and told me that they recently had a meeting with PPL to address the service levels.
6. I received a condescending email from the Operations Director at PPL saying that I had only sent a photocopy in and so he was returning that. Not being a lawyer, even I know that no solicitor is going to accept a photocopy of any ID document.
7. When I complained to the CEO again, he said that they destroy all original documents when they scan them in - WHAT!!! Can you imagine if I sent my passport!
8. Having changed buyer 2 times, they continued to send details relating to the first buyer and I had to chase to get them to change the details.

Then the icing on the cake....today, after being notified by my conveyancer a few days ago to go on line to address something, I couldn't access my account. I called PPL to find out what had happened and my file has been deleted. No notice, no explanation. When I called PPL, the woman on the phone TOLD me that I must have advised them to delete it as they wouldn't do it without my authorisation. When I asked why would I do that, she shouted at me and said it wasn't her fault.

I'm appointing another conveyancer - DO NOT USE PPL.

Used them for a BTL flat a few moths ago.
They were truly awful.

Denied we had sent them emails
Ignored instructions and questions
Took weeks to ask for surveys despite the immediate payment (we received the flat survey IIRC the day before supposed exchange which advised we get a further survey!)

You also have to print out all your paperwork- no hard copies are sent.

They email you to say if new documents have arrived but it merely states something new is in : you then have to trawl through badly scanned (often randomly upside down or illegible )legal documents. With no advice on what you should be looking for.

Never again.

Steer clear of Premier Property Lawyers. They do not chase up important paperwork - just key things like building regs and schedules of works from insurance claims for subsidence which you are supposed to see before you exchange contracts - just had sight of an eleven page document detailing works done to our property through an insurance claim before we bought it - oh - the only problem is we closed the purchase deal in 2012 ! Building regs relating to bathroom refurbishment electrical work - new since Jan 2005 - when ElLECSA came into force - were never obtained from the sellers. Now chasing these and making a formal complaint. Chose this firm because I thought Internet would be easier. Internet is the wrong way to go on this one. Get down your high street - wish I had now. This is the biggest decision you ever make financially. Worth the face to face time to get it right because it is not fun when it goes wrong. Get a face to face solicitor every time.

Do NOT touch Premier Property Lawyers with a bargepole.

There aren't enough hours in the day to tell you all the problems and complaints I have with them. Just a snippet of the latest woe as an example...

Seven weeks after moving in and I've just had a bill from HMRC as they haven't paid our stamp duty - and they're telling us we now owe another £1193 that we didn't know about.

I whole heartedly agree with Mumsay.
STEER CLEAR. DON'T EVENT THINK ABOUT IT!

We bought our property 2.5 years ago with tthe. Simple enough, chain free, nothing too hard for them obviously. We then put it on the market in May this year, and went with them again. Only when selling did we find that our original PPL conveyancer (in this case a guy who's now left PPL and moved to Australia...luckily for him) missed that fact that TWO load bearing walls had been removed (both in the Home Buyers survey) from the house and he'd never asked our sellers for the paper work. We're now thousands and thousands of pounds down as we had to fork out for a whole host of building work to be done to make the house safe for our buyer. Not taking into account that we'd lived in a house for 2.5 year that could have come tumbling down if we'd put a particularly heavy piece of furniture in the bedroom.
We're now starting the battle to retrieve all the money we've had to pay out and are slowly getting over the immense stress it caused. They are frankly a joke.

On line companies are a bad idea face to face is safer, my x partner sold mine with this company without my permission

I reckon the positive comments on this thread must have been posted by the staff at PPL because it would be impossible to find a worse company that actually charges for a service. FOR YOUR OWN SANITY DO NOT GO ANYWHERE NEAR THESE KEYSTONE COPS

Used them in 2011, as long as you don't mind ringing constantly to chase things up, you'll be o.k

Can I make a suggestion?

Browns in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

After a terrible experience with purchasing a house through an online only service, I went with Browns. Professional and exceptional value for money.

I've bought all of my houses through them.

We are using them for our current purchase. Touch wood, all is fine so far.

We would have liked to use a local firm but hat option wasn't available to us. In order to get our Natwest mortgage we had to use a solicitor from their approved 'panel'. This is becoming increasingly common and I suspect will throw lots more work to the big conveyancing houses.

I work for the emergency services so I am used to high levels of stress of which I take in my stride. Dealing with Premier Property Lawyers/Zoom Conveyancing made me so ill with the stress of dealing with them. I will be as brief as I can...

I was not in a chain and told several times by my account handler the whole process should take 6-8 weeks maximum, it ended up taking 4 months. They never reply to calls or emails.

I received my survey report from my lender. I sent this over to my PPL account handler and asked their advice on one part of it. After six days of trying to get a reply I still had not even had as much as an email back. I ended up having to contact the seller of the property I was purchasing myself. He confirmed that PPL had not contacted him at all about my survey report, so a week totally wasted. I also had to have an awkward converstaion with the seller about the survey, something which PPL should be doing on my behalf, is that not what we pay them for. I then found out that my account handler from PPL had left the company and it was hinted to me that it was because of how poor her standard of work was.

Two weeks on and my new PPL account handler told me that he had been waiting for a reply from my management company for 14 days. I called the management company straight away and got all of the answers PPL required. Again, another 2 weeks totally wasted. My management company also informed me that they had returned calls to PPL but PPL were not getting back in contact.

2 weeks on and I was going on holiday for one week. I called the office twice before going away and asked if they required anything from me. Both times they said 'no, we have some questions here but leave them to us, go and enjoy your holiday'. One night into my holiday and I get an email from PPL with 14 questions they needed answering. It was the questions they had the previous week when I was home to answer them. Some of the questions they wanted me to answer were not even for me to answer. I sent my answers back that night and presumed these answers would be passed on to the other solicitor. A week and a half later I ended up speaking with my account handlers manager. She was embarrassed and admitted all the answers i'd sent back were still sitting there and had not been forwarded on to other solicitor. I was fuming at this point and yet another two weeks wasted.

On the day of completion I knew 100% something would go wrong. I called the office to be told my THIRD PPL account handler (the team manager) was off ill. I asked if someone had a grip of the fact I was moving that day. No-one seemed to know anything. Then I got a call saying my account handler wasn't off ill, she was in but unable to speak as she had lost her voice. An hour later the account handler actually calls me to tell me their systems were down and they couldn't complete. So within two hours my account handler was off ill, to in but can't speak, then calls me up. She called again about 3pm and said my sale had gone through but not my purchase so they couldn't release the keys. Whilst this was going on I was in contact with the chap buying my property who said his solicitor was staggered how bad PPL have been through the whole process. What happended next left me fuming. At around 4.30pm I get a call from my account handler saying 'so you have the keys then, congrats'. I replied 'what are you talking about, I have been sitting in the estate agents for 90 mins with my 5 year old son waiting'. She replied 'oh sorry I told the man you are buying off to let you know he will release the keys even though his money is still not in his account because of our system failure'. I told her what I thought of her and the company and hung up. All this time paying removal men £60 p/h from 9am-6pm.

There is many other things I could include on here. It is the worst service I have ever received anywhere, appalling. I just hope you get to read this before choosing them and not after. Good luck.

They were fine, until it turned out the vendor had breached contract. Despite telling us in advance that "there were things we could do if that happened" the attitude suddenly became "that's not us, that's litigation". Cheers. They did pass on messages though.

Please don't use an online solicitor - imagine the frustration and incompetence of a utility supplier's call centre and then magnify the stresses on account of the fact that a lot of money is at stake. Its not the time to be cutting corners.

I totally agree. We were forced by the bank to use Countrywide (had to pay a premium to use our own as well) and they were hopeless.
They only bucked up when we were on the verge of reporting them to The Law Society.
There's a lot to be said for using local conveyances, they know how long searches take, know the locality and you can always pop in and sign papers.

I know this is an old thread but for the love of god if anyone reading this is even thinking about it JUST DON'T

We are not using them but our vendor is, Connells 'free legals' through premier . We have chased and chased and chased to get draft contracts exchanged and I am hoping that there are no questions as I dread to think how long that is going to take! ( we agreed a sale end of December and had the contracts this week our buyers are ready to exchange!)

They have been by far the most stressful aspect of the process so far.

I would also like to contribute to say that we are currently using PPL and I would never, ever, ever recommend anyone else do the same.

They have caused - and continue to cause - an enormous amount of stress, and are seemingly completely incapable of sorting anything out without being telephoned every 30-60 minutes to remind them.

I wish we had heeded all the bad reviews online - instead we thought that since our transaction was a simple one, how hard could it be? Trust me, for them it is VERY difficult indeed. They have completely messed up our searches - leaving us to order our own as well, seem incapable of understanding basic legal information, and often seem to need me to advise them what to do rather than the other way around.

Deeply concerning and we will be complaining about them to their Ombudsman as soon as our sale has completed (haha... like that's going to happen any time soon).

Absolutely terrible service, avoid them like the plague. You will never get to speak to the same person twice and they will keep coming up with reasons as to delay you either further. Going into my four month in waiting to exchange when no one is in a chain. I'd suggest going somewhere local to you live so that you can go speak to people directly.

I've just used them and would not recommend them. They made a lot of stupid mistakes where they were obviously just not checking the information they had been given.
The sale has been delayed because of their errors and it is only the keenness of the buyer that has stopped the sale from falling through.

We are using them. Our conveyancer seems okay and they respond quickly. We have had an issue with having too many open cases but seems to have been sorted. Fingers crossed it goes through okay

Don't use them.

We used Ezie Conveyancing after selling through Purple Bricks; Ezie Conveyancing is just another name the Premier Property Lawyers operates under. They were basically incompetent from day one. I was all over our move as I was heavily pregnant and determined to move before baby arrived (we had no chain, and everything should have been straight forward, this was in June and baby was due in September - we ended up moving in November).
I had to chase them for everything. Like I said, I was keen to keep things moving along at a good pace, I sent stuff back straight away, I completed forms and emailed them back/uploaded them online when I could, I rang I check and double check they had received stuff. The only good thing was that because they have an online portal you can see all the stuff that needs to be done and all the stuff outstanding so I chased everything, often I'd ring and ask why XYZ hadn't been completed/followed up and be told it would be looked into and then later that day it would be done. I am convinced that the only reason is because I rang them so much and they didn't want to have to keep fielding my phone calls.

We had a few hiccups with different things, a few forms went missing/they couldn't find stuff I had already sent for them. Our mortgage offer went a bit squiffy at one point and the advice from the PPL agent was to "look for another house", like that's how it works?! No emotional understanding or maturity to deal with people making life altering decisions, such as moving home.

I found some of their staff outright rude and incompetent and called them on it a few times and made formal complaints, one practically shouted at me and reckoned I'd called her a liar - not what happened.

Just AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.

I used them but they kept asking me for my intended purchase details and I kept telling them at that time I do not have one. I found the online very confusing so i changed to local solicitor. It has come to a point within the last 4 weeks that details are required that are within my house deeds which I thought they had. They said they were sent to me in March (ordinary post) and I have never received them. I cannot produce the said documents, extension of land and underpining details, therefore, my buyer has pulled out of the sale. I cannot even put it back on the market as the same would happen again. Surely such important documents should have been sent in a more secure way. I am so devastated by all of this.

Hi conveyancing has very largely gone down a referral fee route. That means agents and brokers get paid to refer a firm. At first the referrals were about £50 paid by the conveyancing firm to the agent but now they are up to £300. If you look at what you pay for conveyancing this is a big part of the fee.

Firms who pay this are usually large 'factory' operations who have to exist on very lean margins so employ non qualified staff to operate in a very process driven way.

If you want to be sure of an independent solicitor you are better to go local and possibly pay a little more. Buying a home is the biggest transaction most of us enter into so get it done well.

There is a big scandal brewing over this - see all the recent coverage in relation to escalating ground rents in newbuild freehold houses. In a lot of those case buyers were not given the choice to pick an independent lawyer but were forced to go with a firm paying the builders for the work. Nothing like a conflict of interest!

We're using them and I'm amazed at how difficult they are making this. Forgetting to approve contract amendments, chasing documents which don't exist but the most annoying bugbear is that they are impossible to get hold of. They never respond to emails, voicemails or urgent call backs. We have been due to exchange contracts for two weeks now and every few days we discover something else they've done / not done which delays it further. I wish we never used them.