Legalmove.com Hammonds Direct

dontuselegalmove.com

Please Please Please read this if you are considering using Hammonds Direct Legalmove.

I am moving house and I made the BIG MISTAKE of using this company to do my conveyancing.

Price seemed good, they are online and have a nice website, it seems as though they offer an advanced service, less paperwork, no visiting an office to exchange contracts etc....... HOWEVER after instructing them it soon became clear that, as ever, YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR and these people are USELESS.

1) They do not reply to you
2) They lie about who they have contacted and when
3) They offer NO ADVICE of any use and seem as though they have not even passed GCSE law - This means if you have a problem you are on your own when they should be taking the lead and WORKING FOR YOU.
4) They are not interested in the fact you want to move house and get on with your life
5) Other parties Solicitors complain about poor / no communication
6) The online information is of no real use - it's just a brief non-expandable list of headings: instruction, signed contract received, deeds received, searches received etc. What you need to know is what exactly are the sale and purchase outstanding contract enquiries as these are what hold the proceedings up. Unfortunately you can't see this info and nor can you get it from Legalmove. As it's Legalmove that leave these issues un-resolved and don't tell you what they are, all parties are held in limbo until in my case I have started bypassing Legalmove and getting the info myself and resolving issues.
7) The conveyancer's work 9-5 mon to fri so all the extended hours support offers is an answering service (someone foreign who tells you that nothing has been done since you last called - usually exposing the lies your conveyancer has told you about letters being sent, or not as the case has been for me) and then arranges a Call Back which rarely happens.
8) They cannot deal with any difficulties and just seem to ignore everything and wait for everyone else to deal with it
9) They have added weeks to my moving date, in fact I still don't even have an exchange date after 2 months and no real chain
10) I could go on all night - yes I wish I could drop them but it's too late, yes I fear they will balls up the exchange / completion and I will never move.

Please just don't use them, it's not worth it, I will always use a Solicitor I can visit and offers a personal service at a just price.

Just don't go there...............................

sukey13

We used Hammonds Direct once as it was free legals supplied by a buy to let lender (can't remember which). In future I would rather pay to use a "proper" solicitor.

They are absolutely rubbish. Noone on the end of the phone could answer a question. They are like a robotic conveyor belt style conveyancing. They blame different departments, pass you around and then hang up on you or you have to leave a message which isn't returned.

They flagged up that there was two people on the title that had to sign to say that they were OK with the sale going through. We couldn't convince them that was us (even though they'd had our ID, etc and were meant to be working for us so must have known our full names). They sent us paperwork, holding us up, which we signed to say yes we could buy the property. We'd put it on the title as we had an option to buy the house as we had paid off the couple that owns it arrears - otherwise they could have said "thanks very much" and not gone ahead and sold us the house.

In all I would also recomend boycotting Hammonds Direct. Even if FREE with some lenders I would rather pay about £600 or less to use a real solicitor.

boothebirdy

Ditto to what the others said don't touch hammonds direct with a 20ft barge pole! They took forever to finalise our flat purchase and charged a lot more than quoted. Thankfully Your Move have seen sense to ditch them as their conveyancer of choice!

christinereilly

I couldnt agree more, these guys are trained monkeys....

steer well clear if you want to move in the next year!

:beer:

Alexei

I totally agree.

Our vendors chose to go with Hammonds Direct, and it made the process take forever, despite it being a simple sale with only one other party in the chain. Luckily we were using a proper conveyancer, who managed to push the sale through, but only by bypassing Hammonds and doing their job by communicating with the next conveyancers in the chain. Our vendor found it very difficult to get someone on the phone to talk to, even to the point where the keys nearly didn't get handed over on the day of completion.

Please, think carefully before saving a few quid by going with a callcentre instead of a real live person you can deal with personally. What's most important, cutting corners or risking your house sale/purchase falling through?

MrsTinks

We've been trying to re-arrange our mortgage and so far hey have cost us a 4 month delay... so we're paying the old mortgage which is now flexible and not fixed as it's after 2 years and it's costing us big time... AND thanks to them the mortgage rate has risen twice so the rate we're getting isn't what we should have gotten purely because of their uselessness...
And they don't have anyone you can complain to let alone a manager...

USELESS!

trekster

DO NOT USE Legalmove.com

I used them without checking the forums first and that was a BIG mistake.

They are woefully incompetant. Their "conveyancers" can't handle anything difficult, non run of the mill enquiries. They are like robots who follow a script at a call centre. They will pass on any difficult problems/queries onto someone else who never calls back.

Do not believe the blurb on their website saying that you can contact them outside of normal working hours or during the weekend. All you get is a call centre monkey saying they will pass it onto your conveyancer and thats it.

You get what you pay for. Save your TIME and use a proper solicitor, you will thank yourself for it. Save MONEY. They don't provide a direct number to your conveyancer, so you end up with a huge phone bill for calling their 0870 number.

And they are rarely return phone calls or reply to your emails.

Apparently, their poor service is widely known amongst the legal industry.

Pay more for a proper solicitor to do the job, it'll save you stress, time and money.

where2start

Who would your recommend any well know companies i was thinking of using Legal.com but after reading threads i will not, what about Habitvs or Complete solicitors ? any good ??

bparkerson

I've just been looking at Legalmove.com which is part of Fidler and Pepper Solicitors in Nottingham. Is this the same as Hammonds Direct Legal Move?
Thanks