any help on this please

[Fishface101]

I hope i am in the right thread for this its a bit of a long one & a right mess & it does involve bailiffs(honest)

 

ok i had an offer accepted on a house in april this year that i was buying for my parents they had a house sale going through at the same time s o we tried to complete on the house we were buying for the same date as the sale on there house so they could just move straight in well as you can guess this did not happen.

 

my parents sold there house & had to leave so we were left with 2 situations.

1 they could rent a house for 6 months while the sale we had going on was being completed ( i wish to god this is what we had done now)

2 rent the house we were buying till the sale went through

 

yes they rented the house we were buying they paid 4 weeks rent up front we tried to then pin down the vendor to sort out a rental agreement even though we thought it wasnt going to take that long as we had signed the contract & were waiting for the vendor to sign he had a couple of issues with planning which needed sorting & our conveyances said once these issdues had been sorted then we could exchange contracts little did we know the worst was yet to come.

 

a letter which had arrived addressed to the vendor & all other occupiers of the property which did not have a stamp on caught my dads eye which worried him the letter had been there a few days but was left unopened as it was for the vendor. I asked my dad to open it heres the shock

 

It was a notice of eviction dated for the 14th of july 2006 i immidiatly contacted my conveyancers who contacted the solicitors who's address was on the eviction notice Moor & Blatch from southampton my solicitor was told that the eviction notice would not be served if we were to exchange contracts before weds the 13th july 2006 i also contacted the vendor to make sure that this could be done i was told that this would not be a problem he even phoned me on the morning of the 13th of july to tell me he was on his way to the solicitors to sign the contract.

 

I then get a phone call from my solicitors at around 3 in the afternoon asking if i had any contact with the vendor as he had not shown up to sign ther contract

 

it was then panic stations i phoned the court to ask for advice to which i was told that if my father went into the court the next morning to go in front of the judge to ask to be attached to the eviction order & also to ask if the eviction order could be suspended to give my parents time to remove there belongings both at a cost of £35 each.The court then asked the bailiff to suspend the eviction notice while my father was in court.

 

While in front of ther judge the judge basically said that there is no way my father could be attached to the eviction order & was told that the vendor did not have the permission of the mortgage company Kensington mortgages to sell the house & as for renting the house they were doing this illigally as the vendor did not have the permission to do this either therefore the eviction notice was to be served immediately the Bailiff who had been sat behind my father the whole time then stood up & said he would follow my dad to the property to serve the notice.

 

He didnt follow he got out of the court & made sure he got there before my dad he then treated my parents as if they were **** off the street my parents have worked all there live & my mother is now a pensioner he gave them time to put some overnight clothes into a bag & get out as for there furniture they had 7 days to organise someone to remove it & they would only have half a day to do it in & they could not be present themselves while it is being removed as you can imagine they were distraught.

 

i phoned the vendor who told me that kensington mortgages had told him he could sell the house & the reason that he didnt go in to sign the contracts was because kensington mortgages wouldnt let him unless he paid them £20k in full this was the last anyone has heard from him.

 

We at this point did not have a clue what to do after phoning kensington motrgages & being told we dont have authority to speak about this account & being passed from person to person we finally got through to them that all we wanted was our furniture back they did everything they could to block us doing this even when we produced evidence to prove it was our belongings

 

we then took legal advice we got a solicitor to start phoning even then they tried as much as possible to be awkward with him they also told him we had 14 days to remove the furniture & the bailiff should not have told us 7 days but yet there was a notice in the window of the house that said 7 days too so we organised a removals firm for the tuesday who would have to go in do all the packing & remove all the furniture all in half a day which is impossible.

 

Monday evening comes around now we are being told that we could not go in on the tuesday as the company dealing with it did not have any agents to attend whist the furniture was being removed & also we would have to pay for the agent to attend £235 when there was an agent available this was a company called spicer haart who we were now having to deal with there excuse was that they had only been given the job to oversee the repossesion on that monday afternoon we stressed the 7 days thing & that there was no way we could get another removal company within the so called 14 days as they were all booked up they eventually agreed to send one of the office juniors to attend.

 

As we had proved that the belongings were ours they gave us a full day to remove everything & myself & my wife were allowed in to help with the packing but my parents were not allowed we got everthing out of the house but could not get into the garage as this had been nailed shut my dad had a lot of expensive powertools in there.again after a lot of phoning & negotiating we got them to agree to open the garage but the office junior who attended said he had to go & he just opened the garage up after we had left to empty the first van load of furniture leaving the garage open & unprotected.

 

When we arrived back to collect the garage items we found that a lot of my dads powertools had gone were talking about £3k worth

 

The whole thing as well as being very expensive was very traumatising for my parents & very stressfull for us.

our solicitor advised us to just take this on the chin & move on but i'm afraid i cannot he said we could start action against spicer haart for being negligent over the garage items but as the claim was for less than £5k we could end in a situation where we win bit be another £3 - £4 k out of pocket if the solicitors fee's go up to £7 or £8 k to win the claim he said that spicer haart are at fault & are liable for the damages but if they wanted to drag it out through the courts it would cost us more than we could win back.

 

Surely there is something we can do firstly to complain about the treatment & the the fact that in my eyes kensington mortgages tried to block us getting my parents belongings back some of which were very expensive antiques so they could sell them to recover some of the vendors debts

 

also the way the courts & the bailiff treated my parents

 

& also to recoup some of the money we have lost because of all this

 

the only person who has walked away from all this unscathed is the vendor who has as you would expect disapeared

 

I really dont know what to do so any advice on this would be a great help

 

thank you (sorry its along one)

[welly]

Hi

 

I cant give you any advice on this but I am SHOCKED by this and the way your poor parents have been delt with by everyone.

 

Maybe a letter to your MP would be a start and Im sure one of the fantastic people on here may have other Ideas.

 

Welly

[Fishface101]

Thanks

Everyone keeps telling me to let it go but i cant its not the money i'm hust so angry with the treatment & the fact that we could very easily proved to the courts what was going on.

as if it would have been a great hardship for the courts to say ok you can remove your property my parents would have gladly handed them the keys to the house after they had gone.Instead of being thrown out onto the street

 

any help though would be greatly appreciated