This review is for a different branch.
Macks use an outside search agency.
Upon request, the third parties returned all search results to the outside search agency within 3 weeks.
Macks “apparently” didn’t receive them from the search agency for a further 10 weeks !
3 months for the searches to be returned to Macks is ludicrous considering the third parties confirmed that they provided them to the outside search agency within 3 weeks.
Too slow, but a lesson learned for the future to only choose a conveyancing solicitor who do their own “in house” searches and not a solicitor who rely on the lengthy process of an outside search agency.
In effect, a few weeks return via the in house method will keep the cogs turning efficiently towards exchange.
As opposed to the cogs ceasing up completely for months, whilst waiting for the outside agency and potentially risk breaking conveyancing chains.
On completion Macks advised they’d send two documents to us straight away and the third when they were in receipt of it.
Two months elapsed, nothing. Macks were called with a reminder to please post the two documents, nothing.
Another reminder and Macks posted out totally irrelevant documents they'd given us months previously.
Only after the request was put in writing to them and posted by signed for delivery specifying the two documents required they got it right. At last, after a 3 months wait Macks sent us the two documents.
Macks told us that the third document would be following within a few weeks but it didn't.
3 more months elapsed, nothing and Macks had been made aware in writing of our urgency for receipt of this particular document.
By now it was 6 months after completion and this third document still hadn’t arrived.
A call to the third party responsible for issuing the document to be told that there was absolutely no reason why Macks should not have sent it to us months earlier and to call them. A follow up email from the third party confirmed the document was electronically sent to Macks on a date 11 weeks earlier !
Another call to Macks to tell them this and the document was sent to us within the hour !
It appears they had not been efficient after all and again had just kept us waiting months longer than was necessary for a document they could have easily sent within the hour months earlier.
Overall we were extremely dissatisfied with the practice of the solicitor dealing with our purchase, how she handled the trickier parts or rather how she was totally unhelpful and uninterested about handling the trickier parts or offering us professional advice.
We were left feeling that she was taking us for idiots really, telling us that she was making chase up calls or would later that day etc. but wasn’t really.
We asked for our solicitor’s manager within the Property Department to call us back so that we could discuss our negative experiences with her.
We were advised that she would call us back that day but she never did and nor did she reply to our email - very rude to say the least.
It was a most unsatisfactory solicitor experience from start to finish, that made us both quite poorly and at breaking point.
We would neither use ourselves nor recommend Macks Solicitors to our friends or family.
Overall :- An appallingly slow and unhelpful conveyancing service from the solicitor and total disregard of our negative experience by her manager who chose to totally blank us, paying clients of Macks Solicitors.
