If you're a first-time buyer - STEER CLEAR FROM THESE PEOPLE!!! ESPECIALLY if you deal with Sonya Agimol. I had the worst experience ever, and a relatively simple procedure took 6 months to complete.
They claim in their policy that if you're unsatisfied, they have a process in place to resolve it - that's a lie. In fact, me raising a dispute resulted in being ghosted for the 100th time and, 3 months later, they had the audacity to send me an email asking for a feedback. So here I am - providing just that. :)
I will put the bullet points I raised to them and that were ignored:
Lack of consistent updates. To know anything about the case, I was the one to chase Sonya and even then it would take her days to answer with 1-3 sentences at the time. The Law and Lawyers platform meant to track the progress was seldom ever updated. And when it was, it wouldn’t be on time/as the case progressed. I had very little visibility of how things were going.
Repetitive requests to send over documents that were provided previously. On multiple occasions, Sonya asked me to send over documents that were already with her. For example, I sent bank statements of TWO different bank accounts three times as Sonya never clarified which one of them she needed. When the completion date was already set and bank statements were requested AGAIN, she claimed to have not seen one of the account numbers before. I had to prove to her it had been provided to her before, which she acknowledged. No apologies for her mistake or additional stress inflicted.
Lack of clarity. A lot of times I did not understand what was expected from me / which documents were to be filled by me. Sonya would either dump a bunch of pdf files on me without any instructions or casually forward me emails addressed to the seller’s solicitors without giving any context. According to her, this was her way to ‘give me an update’. Which is unacceptable.
Failure to request all required documents. I had to take multiple trips to the bank, pull out different accounts and generally scout for documents all over the place repeatedly because Sonya would forget to include some of them in her initial requests. Or some details regarding them. For example, she requested bank statements of the deposit account, without clarifying the time frame, even when asked. There were multiple instances like this.
Slow communication. Sonya wouldn’t answer calls or emails for days on end, despite being chased by myself, the seller’s solicitor, the estate agent and the broker.
Ignoring questions/parts of email. Sonya would only reply to parts of an email she felt like answering. Often I had to re-send the same question 2-3 times because she would ignore it. Given her slow communication, it could sometimes take days.
Blame-shifting. Whenever called out on inefficiency or lack of communication, Sonya would shift the blame to the seller’s solicitors. However, the seller’s solicitors were very responsive and capable of providing evidence their part had been completed on time. Sonya, in the meantime, never backed any of her claims up.
No annual leave warning/case handover. At some point, Sonya went on an annual leave for 3 weeks. There was no warning of that. I only found out upon chasing her via email and receiving an automated email back. Only after you brought that up with Law and Lawyers I was allocated another case handler. There was no apology or even a mention of anything happening from Sonya.
Requesting bank documents end-of-the-day. The theme with Sonya was to request bank documents 5-10 minutes to 5 PM. Every time.
Hidden costs. At the end of the buying process, I paid almost £2000 more than what I was quoted for.
Confusing manner of speech. Sonya’s emails are always full of typos, copy/pasted text in varying fonts and colours, misplaced capitalisation and lack of punctuation. They are generally difficult to read, let alone understand. Given how she’d repeatedly get confused by things she herself wrote, I’m not sure how was I meant to decipher her emails.