Countrywide Property Lawyers - are they as bad as I've read?

charliechin

Hi all,

First time buyer, our estate agent (Bairstow Eves) has pushed us into using Countrywide Property Lawyers, which to be honest sounded perfectly okay to me.

However, I know these kind of companies have so much volume going through that they quickly build huge amounts of negative reviews on sites like:

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Reviews/Countrywide_Property_Lawyers__5658256

Is this right? Are we really likely to suffer with this firm?

Thanks all,

Russ

Jorgan_2

I have to deal with them on a fairly regular basis, nightmare each time. You never get to speak to the same person twice, sometimes you get the name of the solicitor dealing with the case but usually its red team or yellow team or something along those lines.

Incisor

I tried to buy from someone using them. The experience was so bad that Mrs I and I decided that we would not buy from anyone who used them.

lowis

can you not use your own choice of lawyers? i have heard dreadful things too.

charliechin

It sounds like this company is a problem - as a clincher, how do the following costs weigh up, does anything here stand out as totally unreasonable?

Standard Costs
Legal fees for conveyance - £549 + £98 VAT
Preparation of Stamp Duty Land Transaction Return - £85 + £15 VAT
Fees in respect of carrying out money laundering check - £30 + £5 VAT
Fee to maintain archive of documents - £25 + £4 VAT
Total = £811

Additional Costs
Legal fees for acting as your lender - £125 + £22 VAT
Charge for each CHAPS payment - £40 + £7 VAT
Local Authority & Home Check Search and Locality Search charges - £150
HM Land Registry Charges - £150
Total = £494

Grand Total = £1305

david29dpo

Forget it. The agent get a massive cut. They are thinking of themselves, not you. Pick a good local lawyer.

charliechin

Many thanks for the help so far guys,

The next question therefore must be, how do we find a solicitor / conveyancer that we can trust in our area? I must admit, the more I think about having to deal with a call centre the more woried I am! (I actually work as a helpdesk manager myself!)

Russ

Running_Horse

We found them quite good, when they had something to work with. Obviously there was nothing much they could do about our vendor's local lawyer going off sick, losing documents, and generally moving as slowly as possible. When you phone you will get the office lackey, but do you really want a lawyer answering petty queries all day?

charliechin

What are the pros-and-cons of contacting the selling solicitors to ask what firm they would rather we use? After all, they're the firm who will have to work closely with our solicitors.

Russ

Incisor

They will not engage with you on that question - or should not. Phone a few and get quotes. Get a feel for how they come across.

charliechin

Hi all,

Just had a quick chat with our financial advisor, who I should mention works for Countrywide Something-or-other (Countrwide Mortgage Services I think). He's of course tried to steer us into using Countrywide Property Lawyers as our conveyencers, but to be fair he's also made it clear that it's dead easy for us to go with any other company we like.

One issue he did raise - if there are any problems, we can contact him and he can go to the conveyencer directly to pressure them. But surely if we get a local conveyencer, we'd be in as good a position to do this ourselves?

We're currently looking at one of four local firms, does anyone know anything about these?

1. Dickson Haslam
2. Forbes
3. Napthens
4. Vincents Laverys

Russ