Worse than terrible. Closed down now which is no surprise.
We instructed Ross Coates when we saw a new build house in 2021. It wasn’t finished but we agreed to buy it as we were told by the developers that it would be ready in early 2022. Ross Coates gave us a quote for a fixed fee to sell our old house and buy the new one which we agreed to. That’s when it all started. What followed was a combination of poor planning on the part of the developer and absolute shoddy service from Ross Coates, in particular Remersh Kaur who was unbelievably slow in doing anything. We had to keep emailing her chasing her for updates. She would then say she’d emailed the developers solicitors but they said they hadn’t heard from her. We didn’t know who to believe in the end. We had to ask for another solicitor at the firm to take over as we feared we would lose the house. One of the partners - Stephen Broughton- stepped in and he was better. As time passed, he too got frustrated with the amount of time the house was taking to be finished and kept emailing them for a completion date. When it finally came to completion day we sent the money to Stephen only to be told they weren’t prepared to complete that day as they had issues their end. He also sent me a final bill for the conveyancing, which had increased by £500, citing extra work done chasing the developers constantly via email and phone calls. I was fuming at this point but had no choice but to pay it. Stephen said he was going on holiday the following week and would pass our file to one of his staff to deal with first thing Monday morning. He gave it to Lucy Guerreiro- who was in no rush to sort it out. She then claimed she couldn’t find all of our paperwork and asked me to send it all again. I had to resend everything via email which took me a while to sort out. Then she said one of the documents wasn’t signed by both of us to which I said it was. I double checked it at my end and resent it. She sent me a scanned copy of the same document which had someone else’s signature on it! I pointed this out and she went into full security mode, asking me to send signed authorised copies of our passports by mail to prove our identities. By this time we should’ve completed and they had £300k of our money sat in their bank for nearly a week. She agreed to progress the completion as long as I sent authorised copies of our passports (which costs money to do) that same week in the mail recorded. It all went through but we didn’t send any copies to her as we felt she and her company had wasted our time long enough. I now learn they have been closed down by the SRA. Karma is wonderful thing. They can’t cause any more pain & anguish to anyone.