Katie Bishop
What should have been a straightforward sale and purchase ended up being a months-long nightmare where I woke up dreading having to interact with Glover Priest (GP) The staff at GP are only capable of forwarding emails, and causing problems. Anything else you might expect from a solicitor (legal advice; answering questions in a useful way; flagging and explaining risks or consequences; reading and interpreting searches) appears beyond them. Our case was handled by Sophie Rostill, who is not a conveyancer, but a secretary. Our actual conveyancer was Emma Pulford who, for all I know, is a figment of Sophie’s imagination, because I never received a single email from her, never spoke to her on the phone, and never saw her in person (despite visiting the office). I have no evidence she supervised or engaged with our case in any way. If Sophie had been good at her job, I wouldn’t have had a problem, but alas, this was not the case. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so incompetent in a professional capacity. To summarise a few of the ways GP jeopardised our sale and purchase, they: • Completely messed up our purchase and sale statements, meaning we would have lost out on several thousand pounds had I not spotted the error. When I queried this, Sophie sent vague and unhelpful responses, meaning our broker had to get involved. To reiterate, this very nearly left us almost £3,000 out of pocket due to Sophie’s incompetence • After this error was identified, Sophie messed up our purchase statement AGAIN. Unfortunately, this time her error was not discovered until after completion, meaning we had to pay several hundred pounds to our lender post-move to remedy this • Commissioned an incorrect search and then charged us for the search • Failed to negotiate indemnity policies with our purchaser so badly that our estate agent was forced to step in and negotiate with the buyer on our behalf. • Failed to pass survey queries onto our seller, resulting in us having to communicate queries via their estate agent. Without their help, the sale would have fallen through • Insisted on sending searches to our lender, implying this could result in our mortgage being pulled. We were then forwarded an email from our lender that said Sophie should not have sent them this information, and her doing so was against their guidelines • Asked for excessive evidence regarding gifts months after all necessary documentation was approved by our lender. This put my family out of pocket obtaining documents and driving back and forth to Birmingham multiple times (over an hour’s drive each way). GP did admit fault in this instance and offered us a (frankly insufficient) £50 reduction in fees I could go on, but sadly the character limit prevents me doing so. This was on top of a general lack of communication, and inability to answer questions in a prompt or helpful way. In fact, Sophie’s default appears to be to reply to emails until you ask her a question that requires the slightest bit of knowledge or, frankly, thinking of any kind, and then completely ignore you. GP’s inability to engage critically with anything, and the amount of errors throughout the process meant I had to read every document, email, and statement in infinitesimal detail and research numerous elements or seek advice from experts such as mortgage brokers to check if they were correct (they often weren’t). This became a part-time job and, as someone who is self-employed, lost me a significant amount of income. I dread to think what I might not have caught, and the ways that GP have likely lost us time and money. I have evidence of all of the above, and am considering a more formal complaint, however, currently, I’m too exhausted by the idea of ever having to think about or deal with Glover Priest ever again.