Countrywide Lawyers/surveyors(few questions)

Linily

Literally started the ball rolling last week, found house of our dreams and offer was accepted monday (weds today).

The Countrywide rep in our estate agents and my hubby are meeting at 5pm today.
We havent signed anything yet, so we are free to go elsewhere?

Has anyone ever completed with them?

I suspect our vendor is with Countrywide, how can i find out/stop her, cause she is elderly and wouldnt know about the bad rep?

It would suit us to be delayed though as we havent finished renovating the boat, but we could literally sell it today like you would a car at a garage, and if we r ok with being delayed cause of vendor using cw then it will go through eventually wont it?

Thanks in advance
Lindy

Running_Horse

Click on search button. Enter "countrywide property lwayers". Take your pick.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1167631&highlight=countrywide+property+lawyers

Linily

I seem to have left two words out, HAVING READ...

Kittenonthekeys

When you say your husband is meeting the Countrywide rep, do you mean your seller's agent has recommended you use CPL and have arranged the apptmt for you?
You are of course in no way obliged to go with them and I personally wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. I would go for a local high st. solicitor, or indeed anyone who isn't CPL.
Our buyers are using them and they have been / are being a total nightmare.
They have made ludicrous and impossible demands without their clients' knowledge or permission and subsequently denied ever having made them, held our sale up, ignored our solicitor, lost documents which then mysteriously turned up and our solicitor can never contact them on the phone.

However carefully you have chosen a competent solicitor, if CPL are involved anywhere along the chain (and as you will already have read) there are bound to be additional, unnecessary delays and frustrations - and goodness knows the procedure is already fraught enough with these as it is.

Details of whoever your seller is using to do her conveyancing should appear on the sales memorandum you get from the agent.
And if, as I assume, the selling agent is recommending them, probably no good asking them to talk her out of it.
Unfortunately, you have very little control over who your seller goes with, apart from maybe going to have a chat with her and explaining what you have found out and taking a printout of the reviews from the 'Ciaou' website (which has 93% bad reviews) - before she goes too far along in the process to 'sack' them and go with someone else.
Indeed some people have said they would never get involved with any chain where anyone was using CPL. And now I know why.

Ignite

Cowboys. Countrywide are a complete waste of time and space. When we bought, the vendors were using countrywide and we nearly ended up pulling out of the purchase because of it. They are lazy, incompetent and never seem to tell the truth. They can't even spell in legal documents. Due course was spelt Dew course. Not very impressive. They often say that they don't have access to the land registry and we had to get copies of documents that they should have provided. This was after 6 weeks of our solicitor asking for them. They also said that they couldn't get information about a potential financial liability that the vendors might have in a lease document on the property as the lease holder wouldn't talk to them. I got the info within 30 mins myself. In the end, we had to do most of the work that they should have done. On the day of exchange they even came up with excuses that they hadn't got any legal staff in the building and therefore couldn't exchange that day. After a threat from our solicitor that we would pull out, we exchanged 60 mins later!!!!

Find a good local solicitor that you can talk to face to face. Get 3 quotes and find out who you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day, you are employing them to do a job for you and you need to know that they will do the job properly.

seabright

Not only do I get quite a lot of work from people who have used CPL once (and they only do it once) I find that they are so shocking to deal with that if they are acting on the other side it usually adds about another £100 of costs because I have to run about doing their work for them, because they are hopeless!

Please, don't use them. They're cheap and you'll get exactly what you pay for.

Running_Horse

Linily wrote: »

I suspect our vendor is with Countrywide, how can i find out/stop her, cause she is elderly and wouldnt know about the bad rep?

You can't.

Your vendor chooses her own solicitor, and may not appreciate being patronised by someone assuming her age means she can't use a computer or make a decision.

Kittenonthekeys

Running_Horse wrote: »

You can't.

Your vendor chooses her own solicitor, and may not appreciate being patronised by someone assuming her age means she can't use a computer or make a decision.

OP can find out via sales memorandum
but can't actually stop it
Far from feeling patronised though, I'd personally be really grateful for any information that might help me through what is already a difficult and stressful time.
Our buyers, despite being computer literate and more than capable of making their own decisions, had no idea of CPL's reputation and said they wished they had known then what they know now.

fair_deal_3

Quote taken from Ignite : "They are lazy, incompetent and never seem to tell the truth" Agree 100%