Just thought I'd give some feedback on our recent experience with one of the settlement agency in Perth CS Legal.
For starters our case was thrown around from one person to the other for thd duration of the process. We had four case handlers going through our file and each and every one of them didn't look like they knew what they were doing.
Simple things like not paying stamp duty on a newly built house with FHOG has. Even overlooked and we ended up paying $10,000 extra in stamp duty which now we have to apply for reimbursement. When we were telling them that we don't need to pay stamp duty they were saying "um, are you sure? I'll need to check that"...
Now they are saying that they it happened because they didn't have our building contracts... We had contracts signed well before that... Did you ask for them? No!
When recently asked how long it will take to get stamp duty back, we received no straight answer... Well most of the answers were "I'm not really sure"...
Our initial settlement was scheduled for certain date, however there was a problem with paperwork at the bank an. No one notified us until two days later that our settlement couldn't go through... We had to apply for an extension from developer to get the settlement finalized. We almost missed out on rebate and included package worth over $15,000.
Would you think that if it's your main job and you do these things on a daily basis you would know what you need to look at and make sure you don't overlook missing points.
Instead they blamed the previous person handling the file...
However they were very quick to make sure their fees are included in settlement and paid promptly...
Overall we were really disappointed with the whole process now that we need to follow up our ten grand that weren't taken off our money tree...