Solicitor Fees Buying & Selling

Berty23

Hi Folks,
Need some advice. Thank you in advance.
At the start of last year we put our house up for sale, in feb we took an offer and hired a solicitor to deal with sale. The first thing they did was send us a letter outlining their costs. Weeks and months went bye &we heard nothing from them. We had to chance them to find out what was happening as we were looking to buy another home & needed the money from our sale. We found out more from our estate agent after ringing him. Eventually the sale went through, we got a mortage from the bank approved based on clearing our old balance. The bank sent the revelation documents to our Solicitor but again we heard nothing. So we arranged a meeting, the lady on our case was worse than useless, couldn't find files, name were wrong. Knew nothing about us buying. She eventually found our file and we signed what we believed to be our mortage. The following day we got an e mail saying she was no longer dealing with our file. 2 weeks later we get a call saying not all the documents were signed (mortage already delayed 1 month).
We had agreed to by a house at this stage.
The head Solicitor we had rang his mobile, emailed him and left messages at the office never replied. Then 1 day he said he would call to us. Arrived late over an hour, never apologised and told us 17 signatures were missing got them signed and ran out the door.
The man selling to us was very helpful and gave us keys to the house without payment as we had to leave our house by the weekend as ne owners were taking possession on the monday. This put stress on my 8 month pregnant wife.
So the the Solicitor sent us the bill....
€5700
They gave us 2 invoices Sale and Buying both the exact same €2850.
Then this week sent us another bill for something they forgot €940. And was so nice to say they take off €140.
Does this seem right , the same bill for Sale & Buy.
We are wondering who can we speak to regarding their shocking performance.

silver2020

Solicitors are a law onto themselves. And dare you complain they will hammer you in legals

I recently purchased an investment property.

Professional Fee - €1800 + vat
Disbursements excluding stamp duty - €1041 (planning searches, property registration, general searches etc)

No mortgage involved, so a little less work.

2850 x 2 seems very high for professional fee - I don't see why people don't haggle with solicitors. Max €4k fee combined, but if they sent you an estimate, you've no choice.

L-M

silver2020 wrote: »

Solicitors are a law onto themselves. And dare you complain they will hammer you in legals

I recently purchased an investment property.

Professional Fee - €1800 + vat
Disbursements excluding stamp duty - €1041 (planning searches, property registration, general searches etc)

No mortgage involved, so a little less work.

2850 x 2 seems very high for professional fee - I don't see why people don't haggle with solicitors. Max €4k fee combined, but if they sent you an estimate, you've no choice.

I shopped around and rang a few solicitors. They all seemed eager for the business as its seemingly straight forward enough. Got my professional fees down to €1,050 plus

3DataModem

A huge proportion of conveyances are relatively simple.

However if your is one of the non-simple ones, a good solicitor makes a huge difference.

Having been through about 10 conveyances, I no longer choose my solicitor based on price.

RiseToMe

Can you pm me over the name of the solicitor? I had a similar issue that's still being resolved

daheff

i can understand the Buy & sell fee being the same.


The solicitor effectively has carried out 2 transactions for you. 1 to sell you current house and 1 to buy your new house.

Assuming there were no issues with title/mortgages etc, then the 2 fees should be the same.

Now is that fee a good fee? I don't know. How does it compare with your estimate.


For the fees they forgot, I'd tell them to go swing and point out the problems you had with them during the process, and the undue stress they caused your 8 month pregnant wife, how their ineptitude nearly left you homeless (they should never have allowed the sale go through without the purchase being completed at the same time).