PSA: Check your mortgage "Completion Statement" no matter when it was completed!

booroo

I recently (within the past six months) completed on a new purchase and re-mortgaged an existing property. On  each occasion the mortgage product (different provider) offered some cashback.

I received a final "completion statement" for the new purchase which stated (I'm paraphrasing) "Any funds due to you will be credited upon completion. Please allow up to 5 working days to receive the final funds" with confirmation that I was due a refund of just £30+. OK, fine, I thought. I'll just wait a couple of weeks before I check that I've received it. A few days later, I received an email stating "funds have been transferred, this matter is now closed. Thank you...blah blah blah". I checked my account and I had indeed received the funds. 

A few weeks later, I was thinking about the general atrocious service that I'd received from the conveyancer when I suddenly remembered that the product actually offered around £500 in cashback. I contacted the lender who confirmed that the funds had been passed to the conveyancer along with the full mortgage payment on the very same day! I contacted the conveyancer who flippantly stated (again paraphrasing) "I'm terribly sorry about that, we've recently changed our systems and would have caught up with it at some point. Here's your money". I pointed out that the account had apparently been "closed" so someone should have been made aware that the money was there. Regardless, I just passed it off as a rubbish conveyancer (one that I had enlisted after careful research) doing a rubbish job and was glad to have the money even if it was around 3 months after completion! 

The re-mortgage of the other property was completed a couple of months ago (by the lender's conveyancer, this time) and you can guess full well that almost the exact thing happened on this occasion. Only this time I did not even receive a final statement until I actually asked for it a couple of days ago. When I saw the cashback in the statement, I queried it's transfer to me at which point the conveyancer simply asked for my details with no acknowledgement of the fact that it had just been sitting in my account. In total, I was due just under £1K from these product purchases which I very easily could have forgotten about. The worrying thing is that I'm usually very much on the ball with things like this (I am on moneysavingexpert, after all) and simply forgot due to the fact that I had been busy renovating one of the properties as well as the fact that completion on the purchase dragged on for 8/9 months. It's worrying to think how many other people may have been taken advantage of in similar situations. I know that I really shouldn't tar all conveyancers with the same brush  (though I do think the whole housing industry is due massive disruption to bring it into the 21st centurty) but it was a little too much of a coincidence for my liking. 

So...to all of you...no matter when your mortgage was finalised please check your final statements.

davidmcn

booroo said:

the conveyancer flippantly stated (again paraphrasing) "I'm terribly sorry about that, we've recently changed our systems and would have caught up with it at some point."

To be fair, that's true - conveyancers can't just pocket clients' money (well, in theory they can in the same way that crooked bankers can, but in practice it's not going to happen). At (realistic) worst you'd just have had a delay until they sent the surplus funds to you.