Hek Jones Limited

We recently completed on a house sale moving from London to Cardiff and are so grateful we had instructed Helen Dickie at Hek Jones to guide us through the process.

We encountered a number of issues outside of our control – the people who accepted our offer took over 4 months to find a house, we lost our house sale while waiting, and then someone in our chain sadly died prior to exchange. Had we had a less experienced solicitor we would have lost the house and a lot of money, but Helen acted quickly on every step, and communicated readily throughout. She managed the chain with ease, going over and above her job and our expectation to get the completed sale.

My husband and I would recommend her to anyone looking for a conveyancer or a solicitor in general.

Hek Jones are the company used by Yopa that if you use them you don’t pay Yopa until completion. Obviously Yopa get a kick back.
I am a landlord and have purchased and sold a number of properties. Hek Jones are the worst I have come across. I am selling a flat with vacant possession to a first time buyer. We are in week 20 and still not even discussing dates to complete.
This company are below par and should not be able to call themselves solicitors.
Go elsewhere and save the pain and frustration I am dealing with. I have to call them every week to chase them.

I chose Hek Jones on recommendation from my broker, L&C. In hindsight, I should have been more fastidious in my research.

I have found my solicitor to be unapproachable, unavailable, and on one occasion, incredibly unprofessional - making a thinly-veiled threat to drop my case should I continue to question why it has taken up to 14 days to respond to very basic questions asked via email. My solicitor’s reaction was astonishing - a woe-is-me, self-pitying email demonstrating a fragility and instability, questioning how I dare ask why the process has taken so long. All communications have been kept.

We are now in a situation where the seller’s solicitors have indicated readiness to exchange and complete. I was informed of this by my solicitor - only after having chased them up - almost two weeks ago.

Since then, we have had zero movement. No contact with either me or with the seller’s solicitors. I know this because the house I am buying currently belongs to a family member.

This process has dragged on for months. I appreciate that this is often normal but at every stage, the seller’s solicitors have been infinitely more responsive, professional and have demonstrated a willingness to move the process on at every opportunity.

I cannot fathom why my solicitor at Hek Jones has consistently dragged their feet.

There is no chain, there have been few issues with the process; those which have arisen - minor issues with searches - have been responded to promptly. And yet, we have been involved in this process for almost five months now.

Not only can I not recommend Hek Jones to those going through the conveyancer selection process, I must actively recommend that you remove them from your list. This experience has made a ‘slam-dunk’ house sale a stressful and unpleasant process. I would even go as far as saying that I have rarely come across someone as ill-suited to a customer/client-facing role.

Avoid.

Recently I have bought a 3 bedroom house in East London. The exchange was done within 5 weeks and after 1 week was the completion with another Solicitor or Conveyancer.

My experience with Hek Jones Solicitors was more than worst. I started to buy a flat in South London and Countrywide Home Conveyancing/Hek Jones Solicitors on 15 August 2022. The Solicitor Mr PL discovered my mortgage offer after 26 days and started the process/requested for a search after that. Ineffective or lazy or incompetent, don't know what was the cause. After months of waiting and pain and also corresponding with the Estate Agents as well, the matter was not progressing. More than after 5 months the Seller pulled out from the process in January 2023. In February 2023, the Legal Assistant SW of Hek Jones Solicitors emailed me, "We note that there is a balance of £23.20 to be returned to you.
So that our accounts department can process the funds transfer, please provide us with a recent bank statement (or banking app screenshot)." After replying with the bank statement (asked for the calculation as well) no reply or was not returned the balance. They know if they ignore our emails we have nothing to do, cause we are sufferers. Please go with these Solicitors if you want to be a victim or sufferer.

The reviews vary so we can only assume that we were unlucky to be allocated Luisa and Elise, as others seem to have had a more positive experience. In our opinion, ours cost us our purchase, gave us sleepless nights and no end of stress. We feel that if it wasn't for the work we did ourselves and the brilliant estate agents, we'd have got nowhere. A lot of the time it was like wading through treacle. Easier to bullet point it:
- Dreadful communication. The phone will be answered in a half-@rsed way and 99% of the time you'll be put through to an answerphone. You can try leaving a message but it's unlikely it'll be returned.
- Email. You can try asking for updates but they'll be few and far between. Luisa actually told us that she has a three day working week turnaround so if you email her on a Wed it could be Mon before she reads it and even then, don't expect a reply.
- They didn't appear to chase anything. It took them two months to tell us that our buyer's papers hadn't been received and we sorted out delivery! If a response from another solicitor wasn't forthcoming it was left to us to try and sort it out with the estate agents who tried to get through but were usually met with the dreaded voicemail.
- Emails were sent by our seller's solicitors but Luisa and Elise insisted that they hadn't been received and it needed the estate agent to intervene.
- Our sellers were still receiving enquiries six months in - after we'd been told everything was in order and we could exchange. This was obviously wrong and proved the final straw for our sellers as they withdrew and we lost our purchase.
- Completion on our sale was a circus and in our opinion we almost lost that too.

We're now in rented accommodation and looking for our next home and will most definitely NOT be using HJ. Everyone says that buying a house can be stressful but that stress should be reduced by the expertise and professionalism of a qualified conveyancer, neither of which we found with Hek Jones. Even the estate agents said that they had never come across such unhelpful, slow solicitors - damning indeed.

Julia Hurren and her team have looked after us for the sale of one property and the purchase of two others in the last year. Julia guided us through the processes and her excellent advice was invaluable as we aren't very experienced in house sales and purchases. We relied on her quite heavily to look after us as I was undergoing cancer treatment during this time and she was absolutely brilliant, taking care of everything in a timely and efficient manner which meant we had one less thing to worry about. We are indebted to her for taking so much of the pressure off us in such a difficult time. We would certainly recommend Julia to anyone needing a conveyancing solicitor and shall definitely call upon her services for our next purchase.