Anyone used Premier Property Lawyers?

sprocker1

They are as bad as everyone says....... However..... the fact that they delayed the potential purchase of a property, made me look more closly into the property I was buying.
After weeks and weeks of being messed around I decided to pull out of purchasing this perticular property. Much to the Estate agents disgust!!
I am now happily living in my new house, which was a much better purchase, bigger and in a nicer area!
So in a twisted sort of a way, their incompitence did me a big favour!!
Remember there is ALLWAYS light at the end of the tunnel!

GDB2222

sprocker1 wrote: »

They are as bad as everyone says....... However..... the fact that they delayed the potential purchase of a property, made me look more closly into the property I was buying.
After weeks and weeks of being messed around I decided to pull out of purchasing this perticular property. Much to the Estate agents disgust!!
I am now happily living in my new house, which was a much better purchase, bigger and in a nicer area!
So in a twisted sort of a way, their incompitence did me a big favour!!
Remember there is ALLWAYS light at the end of the tunnel!

Really, their incompetence bailed you out of your own incompetence!

kayfaz

I have registered with Lifetime Legal conveyancers, whose managed by PPL.

Since yesterday I have started the ball rolling, so far so good.

They asked me for an initial payment of around £200 for registering with them and today for another £330 for searches (hope I'm not paying for something I shouldn't be!!)

I have heard many mixed reviews, but the fact that everything is online (and me being a computer geek!) I still went for them!

I have my fingers crossed and will keep you all informed of how it goes.

Bumpkie

Hi all. We have first time buyers behind us and people moving to a new build in front of us. People in front of us are using PPL and they have sent absolutely nothing to our solicitors as yet - almost three weeks later. Fact is, we're going to be homeless for a week as it is (stamp duty exemption ends (purchasers) and our sellers can't go until a week later because of school exams) - but at this rate, I am starting to worry about the date they will in fact be able to complete. Agents are chasing, I'm chasing, solicitor is chasing. Stressville.

knowless

They are appalling, not cheap nor quick. They add stress to a chain where there needn't be any. Talk about paying peanuts. What is true is that you get a MONKEY. THe Little Britain sketch "computer says no" is bang of for the likes of PPL, 1st Property Lawyers (same outfit), O'Neill Patient (take out the apostrophe and the capitals and they are all sick) and Countrywide not to mention the other conveyancing factories which seem to dominate. The estate agents all think they are great as most of them are being paid to provide the referral. Whatever happened to the local high street who have young clever pepole who will see you when you want (and at no extra cost) and who will be cheaper than these factories!

London2012

First of all I have to say that they are not Lawyers but Conveyancers but very bad ones at that. I have had a nightmare going through the property buying process with premier Property Lawyers. The process took 9 months in total - from April 2011 to when I finally exchanged on the 13th January of 2012.

Due to their incompetence and lack of communication the vendor died and the property had to go to Probate. They sat on information that had they passed to me immediately would have speeded matters up and the property purchased before the unfortunate demise of the old lady.

Eventually when Probate was granted, prematurely they requested for the Mortgage funds. Mind you at this stage dates have not been agreed. As a result of this the first mortgage payment was deducted from my account by the bank - this for a property that was not yet mine. My address was changed and all my financial document were being sent to this address. The bank even sent me a 'Welcome to your new home hamper to this address. Luckily, the vendors estate agent was a very kind individual and retrieved all my correspondence as the property was empty.

I had a nightmare getting the first Mortgage payment back it took 6 weeks for this money to be refunded as nobody was taking responsibility for requesting of sending the Mortgage funds.

The nightmare is still going on because 2 weeks ago I received an invoice from the Inland Revenue for the payment of the stamp duty of this property. I had paid this to Premier Property Lawyers along with all the other fees. I quickly sent them an email asking them why this was and to confirm that this has now been paid. No reply. This morning a letter arrives again from the IR and they have added interest to this money. I don't know what to do.

This is exactly what they did with the Mortgage money they requested prematurely. They sat on it for 21 days and the large sum of money earned them interest while they pretended they did not know. As the bank told me, if you were any sort of honest business would you not find it strange to receive that kind of money and then to keep it for that amount of time.

I have to mention also that in all the delay due to the incompetence of this company I lost the buyer of my property as I have invested a lot into my own property and it was a good price I had to proceed. I released equity from my other property to continue and became an accidental landlord as I now had to rent the other property out. I never wanted to be a Landlord or to be the owner of 2 properties. The situation scares me to death - what if I am unable to meet the Mortgage payments.

This is what happened to me and it still has not ended. So whoever is advising you to use PPL is either an employee or a very lucky person. 2 people dealt with my property and the service was they same. There is a culture of incompetence in this company and if you want to sour the journey to your new house then by all means use Premier Property Lawyers.

junglist_matty

My girlfriend and I are first time buyers, a good friend of mine is a property lawyer (a proper lawyer not a conveyancer) and I got him to give me a full quote for us which came to £2700 including stamp duty.

We are buying a house in Cambridgeshire and our mortgage company is "The Cambridge Building Society"; we did not have many choices with mortgage company as my girlfriend works as a supply teacher and is considered to have a temporary working contract.

"The Cambridge" mortgage company for some strange unknown reason didn't accept my friend's law firm as a solicitor and we had to use someone else that was on their list. We were advised that Premier Property Lawyers are a good company and as we are first time buyers we didn't really know any different or anything about the selling/buying process. To date, we've not had many troubles with PPL, we are currently waiting for them to complete the various searches that need to be done.

Contact is limited, you ring up and get pretty much no information from them, they have an online interface so you can login and check your case, although this tells you nothing you don't already know and simply dispalys all the work that has completed, in our case ID checks and completed initial forms.


Our "quote" from PPL is £2600 including stamp duty so not really any cheaper than a good friend of mine who I know would have done a very thorough job!

I'll update if we have any troubles with PPL, our case rep seems to be doing a good job for us, although I've not had one email response from PPL and asked them 3 questions. Each time, I have to ring them to find out what needs to be done.

For now, all I can say is that I'm hoping for a good service from PPL!

kybu

Avoid them.

We are currently using them and in my opinion they really have no idea what they are doing. If they were cheap it would not be so bad and they have no ethical about acting for both seller and buyer. Unfortunately we need the purchase to go through quickly so are unable to change but I would never recommend them to anyone. They tried to explain 6 pages of covenants with 1 sentence and keep their profit margins high by being rude to you when you ask them to make simple enquiries on your behalf that previous high street firms have done in the past. Perhaps someone should set up a facebook group for those who dislike PPL. Anyone else who has had a poor service from this lot should contact the Council for Licensed Conveyancers to complain.

portsaidred

Hi as it says in the title, it's true but I am not often moved to post much on here as useful as I find everyone elses comments.
We used PPL Last year for a purchase that fell through due to our buyers losing their buyers etc. Not PPL's fault at all and we thought that the work they had done seemed, good, they kept us informed and returned the money we had paid out for searches.
So when we came to try again this year, we were happy to go with them again.
As far as we can see they have handled our sale well, it's the purchase that has made us see the light.

We have taken a chance on a repossessed property, which is in surprisingly good condition and is pretty new. We contacted our "man" Vishal by phone and discussed the situation, the need for speed 28 day completion etc. (I wont go into the potential pitfalls here, sure most of you know them). He was enthusiastic and said how he would make sure that things proceeded at the right speed etc.

Unlike the sale we noticed there seemed to be a lack of information on the purchase on the website, but we only really became worried 9 days later when the estate agents contacted us to say that the sellers were concerned as they had apparently tried to send the initial contracts to PPL only to be told they weren't acting for us in this purchase!

On contacting Vishal ourselves he said "well you haven't opened a separate case file with us!" After explaining that we didn't realise we had to and HE HAD NEVER MENTIONED THIS, despite other communication regarding mortgages etc. We then set about opening up the file. We made it clear that it was imperative he should contact the sellers to reassure them they were on board and he said he would.
6 days later (and some 17 days after we first spoke to PPL about the purchase) we were contacted again by AMG via the estate Agents to be told that as they had NO COMMUNICATION from us/PPL that they were breaking the contract and refusing to sell us the property.

To cut a long story short, the only way we were able to resurrect the deal was to sack PPL and make an improved offer on the property to show good faith. After days of waiting to see if we would be outbid, we ended up outbidding ourselves.

Once we have finally exchanged we will be seeking compensation, we have some very good evidence of their incompetence and will be taking it higher if necessary.

Like I said, 1st time poster but not a "false positive" one. I hope I am not moved to post again too soon either.

junglist_matty

So it's a good two weeks or so since I last posted, our case with PPL is still going well, we have not had any problems with them. They have always answered their phone and been easily contactable.

We are near the end of the buying process, we did have a bit of a hiccup in that the house has a flat roof at the back of the house and this flat roof did not meet building regulations and did not have a certificate. We contacted the seller about this, who was happy to bring in the builders to fix the roof and get it up to scratch with building regs. This was done and this week the re-valuation survey was done they were happy with the work that had been completed. The £10,000 mortgage retention on our initial offer has now been lifted and we are waiting on the sellers solicitors to respond to 8 raised enquiries.

Hopefully it won't take too much longer, but going from my experience, PPL have been fine. I've had to ring them a few times to get the ball rolling, but with a bit of persuasion, the work is getting done. Initially we wanted to be in before the stamp duty deadline, but this has passed, and in the process we've had a reduced offer accepted because of the extra hassle we've had in buying the property.

Overall, it's been fine so far but I don't want to speak too soon as we are not there yet... Being they deal with such a vast number of cases, unfortunately there are always going to be a few unhappy customers....