It’s been an interesting few days, involving broken appointments and ultimatums from Crest Nicholson.

So, where to start?

As I’d said, Crest Nicholson were getting anxious about taking so long to get ready to exchange contracts.

As have I.

But Crest Nicholson still have work to do on the house, and I’m not going to exchange contracts until either I’ve verified that they’ve done the work, or the uncompleted work gets listed in the contract as a cause for delaying completion. That way, Crest Nicholson have an incentive to ensure that it’s completed.

So, at the beginning of last week I was planning on going down to the property at the weekend to make sure that the work had been done, so that we could exchange contracts this week. To that end I had a conversation by e-mail with Kerry at Crest Nicholson.

Monday July 11:

Kerry:

…
Please provide dates and times to arrange an appointment to view again, this week, with a Crest Representative.
…

Me:

…
If you’re comfortable that the work’s going to be complete by the end of this week then the morning of Saturday 16th works for me. Say 10.30am?
…

Kerry:

…
I am working on an appointment for you. I can not promise Saturday. Please can you provide me with your avaliability for Thursday and Friday.
…

Tuesday July 12

Me:

…
At the moment I’m not available — I’ll be at home on those
days, and the estate agents have been told that if they have any
viewings this week that they should make appointments for Wednesday,
Thursday, or Friday. I’m trying to make sure that I always have at
least three days a week kept free for viewings.

If you would prefer, I can cancel them.
…

Kerry:

…
We are unfortunately unable to accommodate weekend viewings at this time.
…

Which is fair enough, and they’ve complained to me in the past about estate agents sometimes not being able to get hold of me to conduct viewings. So viewings must be more important right now than letting me check over their work.

But wait, what’s this? It’s an e-mail from Jeanette Kisby, who’s handling this while Kerry goes on holiday for a few days:

Thursday July 14

Jeanette:

…
3. Would you like to view the property? If yes, please advise either Fri 15th Sat 16th or Mon 18th ( by prior arrangment please). please confirm by close of business today.
…

Which looked promising. So I reply back with:

Saturday morning would suit me.

With that arranged, I shift my schedule around to make sure that I can visit the property, and go along at the weekend.

To discover that the keys haven’t been left. Every other time I’ve needed to visit Connells, the estate agent, have left the keys with a rep from Leach Homes who is also at this site. Today, however, I’m told that Crest Nicholson’s snagging manager took the keys with him on Friday.

So, there’ll be no inspection of the property by me that weekend.

So, Monday morning I’m all prepared with a scathing e-mail to Kerry asking what’s going on and why they’re messing me around. This was slightly complicated by some issues with personal e-mail system, and Kerry beats me to the punch with this, which I finally see on Tuesday (no e-mail means I don’t have the phone numbers available either):

Please can you confirm that contracts will be exchanged today.

This followed from a call from my solicitors (Pictons), who read out some of a letter from Crest Nicholson Nicholson’s solicitors. So I send the following on Tuesday 19th after hiking down to an Internet cafe:

Your solicitors are not keeping you fully informed. Pictons asked them for additional information (based on information I asked Kerry for last week) on Friday, and that has not been forthcoming.

Specifically, as I said to Kerry last week, I require the complete list of work that Crest have agreed to carry out, not the list of items that Crest believes to still be outstanding. Based on your track record of dealings with me, I have little confidence that you telling me that some work has been satisfactorily carried is a good indicator that it has actually been carried out.

I asked Kerry for that last week, my solicitors asked for it last week, and it’s not been provided. You haven’t even said “No, we won’t provide this”, you’ve just completely ignored the request.

In addition, after agreeing with Kerry that I would be visiting the property last weekend to verify that the work had been completed, I arrived to discover that, according to the estate agents/Leach, your snagging manager had taken the keys with him on Friday, and that I couldn’t get access to the property.

I also note that, according to the letter from your solicitors that was read to me today, you believe that I am the cause of the current delay.

Could I just remind you that Crest has had the full snagging list since the 14th June, and originally told me that all the work would be carried out by the 24th June. You comprehensively missed that deadline, and the deadline of the 5th July, and a deadline of the 8th July. And there’s *still* work to be done on the house.

For your solicitors to accuse me of delaying this exchange is, quite frankly, ludicrous. The last five weeks of delay are *entirely* down to Crest.

I wasn’t able to get hold of either you or Kerry by phone today. I will be trying again on Wednesday.

I also suggest that Kerry and yourself have your line manager ready to join the call, as there is quite a few things I want to say to them.

It’s worth noting at this point that, following my meeting with Crest Nicholson reps at the house I am still waiting for a formal written list from Crest Nicholson of the things that they’re going to put right.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was full of surprises. Not least of which was a letter Crest Nicholson’s solicitors sent to mine which starts:

We are instructed by our clients that they were not informed that your client wished to make a site visit last weekend otherwise they would have arranged this. They believe that he would want to meet them this week, however will arrange to meet him at the weekend.

There’s two untruths there. First, Crest Nicholson were well aware that I wished to make a site visit last weekend. Second, in my e-mail to Jeanette on Thursday 14th I’d also said:

Next week I will be in London all week, with no opportunity to visit the solicitors. So if there’s any additional documentation that I need to read, sign, or initial it will be very difficult for me to do that.

I got hold of Kerry by phone at about 10am, and had a singularly unproductive phone call, which finished with Kerry saying that if we didn’t exchange by Friday the deal would be off, and me stating that I’m not prepared to exchange contracts without either (a) confirming that they’ve carried out the work they said they would, or (b) getting a full list of the work from Crest Nicholson.

We appear to have reached an impasse? Who’s going to blink first?

The call did result in a promise from Kerry that her boss, Sarah Jones, who is apparently the Sales and Marketing Director for Crest Nicholson (Chiltern), would call me later in the day.

That she did. At 5.10pm. You’d almost think Crest Nicholson were trying not to get in touch with me. That call took about 30 minutes. And?

Crest Nicholson blinked. The exchange deadline has been pushed back to next Monday. At 11.30 next Monday I’ll be meeting several Crest Nicholson reps at the property to verify that the work’s been completed satisfactorily. And if it has, we’ll exchange.