estate agents, higher solicitors fees: sequence homes and click conveyancing

Nenen

Warning: be careful when using a solicitor (particularly Barnett’s) recommended by estate agents (particularly in the 'Sequence Homes' group) that you’re not paying through the nose!

We are in the process of selling our house with an estate agent who is part of the 'Sequence Homes' group (they seem to include lots of seemingly 'local' estate agents who each have their own name on shops, for-sale boards etc e.g. 'William H Brown' but are actually one big group/network). When we instructed the estate agents, they asked us if we would like a quote from their 'recommended' solicitor, Ms X at 'Barnett’s'. We agreed to a no obligation quote, signed what we were told was an instruction for a quote (turned out later that, despite crossing through charges etc, Barnett’s and EA had taken that to mean we were definitely instructing them) and received a quote from Ms X but didn't then take this any further. When we eventually got a buyer (3 months later) we did a bit of research on the net about Barnett’s and found that their website offered an online quote which we tried. Turned out it was around £100 cheaper than the one that had been passed to us by the estate agents. My dh rang Barnett’s to find out why the online quote was cheaper than the one we received via EA and repeatedly got told 'the quote you had in writing is the correct one' with no coherent explanation about the difference.

Me, being a persistent madam, delved a bit further and rang Barnett’s solicitor again the following day. I got through to someone who obviously hadn't swallowed the company handbook and told me (I'm guessing she wasn't supposed to) that in fact Barnett solicitors have THREE different prices for exactly the same transaction:

1. Most expensive if you instruct them via Sequence Homes
2. A little cheaper on Barnetts.co.uk own internet site
3. Cheapest on their clickconveyancing.co.uk site (which is still Barnett’s Solicitors, same address, staff etc) and around £300 cheaper than quote 1!

It didn't take much brainpower to decide to go with Barnett’s through clickconveyancing! We then instructed the solicitor through clickconveyancing, got sent the name of the solicitor (Ms Y) who would be handling our sale, told our estate agent the name of the solicitor at Barnett’s we would be using and left it at that. We received a letter and email confirming that Ms Y would be acting for us and confirming costs (cheapest).

Move forward three weeks... having filled in all the necessary instruction forms and posted them to Ms Y, I tried to ring her today to check she had receive them (thank goodness I did)! I got told that she was not handling our account, Ms X was. Spoke to Ms X who told me that as our EA had originally instructed Barnett’s that we wanted her to act for us (without any instruction from us to do so as we only wanted a quote) when the papers had arrived on Ms Y’s desk her ‘conflict of interest search’ (meant to ensure the same solicitor isn’t acting for both buyer and seller) showed her Ms X already had the case and so she forwarded all the paperwork to her. She did not bother to let us know of this! Now Ms X is acting on our behalf at the higher fee unless we go to all the hassle of instructing our EA we don’t want her, closing our account with her, changing to Ms Y etc etc etc!!!! I’m worried if we do this our buyers might get worried too.

The thing I am most mad :mad: about is the THREE different prices that the same solicitor’s firm is operating! To be fair, in the small print of the original quote they sent us, it does say that they pay Sequence Homes a fee of £75 per client (supposedly to cover any costs they incur if they act as witnesses for any documents, send any faxes, paperwork or emails on our behalf, none of which we actually need) plus a monthly fee to Sequence for ‘promoting and marketing our services through their branch network’. It does state that there is ‘no additional charge to you’ for the support services Sequence Homes provide to Barnett’s. What I can’t find anywhere is something saying that Barnett’s will charge you more in the first place if you go through Sequence (presumably to cover the money they are paying to Sequence)!

Long rant over… hope this helps someone avoid these extra charges. Any advice about what we should do would be gratefully received!

Fondue_2

Hi

You need to write a formal complaint to the firm. Head it up to the 'Complaints Partner', all firms required to have one. Just explain what happened and that you want the cheaper rate since this is the one you formally agreed to. They have to respond to complaints, and it's probably not worth the hassle of maintaining that you have to pay the higher rate.

In terms of the different fee levels, they can charge you what they like, and they can charge different fees for different referral sources. However they can't pass on any referral fee that they pay to the EA directly to you.

HTH