5 reviews (3/5) and information for Martin Tolhurst Partnership LLP, Sittingbourne

03/10/22 - Reviewed by Martin Tolhurst - Astounding mismanagement and incompetence

Martin Tolhurst have been in charge of the conveyancing for the sale of my property since February 2022 and I shall be making a formal complaint regarding my experience with this firm. The astounding level of mismanagement and incompetence I have been subjected to by Martin Tolhurst has caused undue stress and duress. This is professional incompetence and a failure to supply a level of service of a reasonable quality in a timely manner. This failure of management has caused an increase in costs in the proceedings and is jeopardising the sale of my property for no procedural reasons other than the failure in effective management of the case.

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12/01/22 - Reviewed by Will

The transaction fell through at the final stages, within days of exchange, and the conveyancer was one of the reasons!

I wouldn't usually write a review, but given my awful experience working with this firm, I have to highlight some of the things that the conveyancer was at fault for to make people aware of the things that could go wrong if you use this firm. As the buyer, we were chain free, and she (conveyancer at MT) was working for the seller

Firstly, after initial enquiries were raised, the responses back were not clear and required further follow ups and it took many emails to then get her to actually act upon the issues raised. Eventually after about 4 weeks of refusing to act, finally she did look into indemnity insurances and relevant local authority requests, but the tone of her emails were such that either she didn't understand the issues or she wanted to brush the issues aside hoping they would be ignored. Whilst there was a week delay on our side given holidays/sickness during covid times, the delays she caused then led to the seller being more upset about the delay in exchange.

It seems highly likely she blamed everything on the buyer/us, as she and the seller became more and more unprofessional / unreasonable in their engagement as the transaction progressed. The seller complained about delays, even though she was also to blame and we did ask the estate agent to make clear the delays were not purely due to us chasing up deficiencies in the transfer titles.
By finally acting on these enquiries raised she clearly knew they did need acting upon, its just a shame it took several weeks to get to that point.

Secondly, once the relevant open points were being actioned, after previously agreeing to pay for the indemnity insurance, they then backtracked and said we as buyers would have to pay for it. This deficiency had nothing to do with us as buyers, and was purely due to the fact someone previously missed this defect in the transfer at the time when the seller bought the property many years ago.
Then after back and forth on this, we were threatened with needing to exchange AND complete within 5 days, even though there were still open enquiries and as many know we would have needed at least 5 days to draw down the mortgage funds. Either she had no intention of exchanging/completing at that point or she had forgotten the basics of a property transaction.

Finally, we decided to agree to pay the extra fees that the seller was imposing on us, and offered an exchange that same week, but with a delay to completion by 2 weeks to allow for Xmas and us to obtain extra funds to pay for the extra monies we needed to complete. This offer was declined by the conveyancer so we then had to pull out from the transaction. After informing the estate agent of this, they spoke to the seller who said he was never given an offer, so never formally declined the offer. But it was too late....the conveyancer at Martin tolhurst had decided to act for her client and not even put forward the offer of exchange/completion to her client.

I thought conveyancers were supposed to always act in the interest of their client, act with integrity, and be honest/truthful but I find that hard to believe in the way we have been treated, and now due to Martin Tolhurst's firm we are now out of pocket for a significant amount of money and lost out on what was a done deal!

Stay away from this firm if I was you!

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10/01/19 - Reviewed by Sean Lawrence

This was just about the worst and most unprofessional service I have ever encountered. Avoid this company at all costs, otherwise it will be at your cost! From start to finish, the conveyancer was extremely inefficient and did not seem to know what she was doing. By the end, she was becoming rude and unhelpful. Ours must have been amongst the simplest of house sales. Our seller had already purchased a house. Our buyer sold their house soon after they put an offer on our house. We organised the survey and property searches for the house we were purchasing ourselves. There was very little for our conveyancer to do, but she managed to make a mess of almost everything. The partner at the firm is no better. We put in complaints, but heard nothing back from him. We paid over the odds because we thought we would get a good, speedy service and be able to move quickly. Exactly the opposite. I ended up losing a days pay because the conveyancer refused to get her act together and help us move during our holiday time. House moving is stressful. This company managed to double the stress and more. I had to give a star rating. If I could, this would have been a negative number of stars.

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