Talking PropertyOf the professional services I used to move house, it was the most expensive - lawyers and lenders - which performed the poorest, writes Justin Comiskey

Everything with our house move was going well. Contracts had been signed, deposits paid, the mortgage company was happy, solicitors happy, the removals company organised, time off from work arranged and even family and friends had agreed to help. With less than 24 hours to go before moving, all the hard work involved in changing house was reaching fruition.

Then the phone goes . . . it's the mortgage company. "There's a problem with the life assurance on your mortgage and, without it in place, the loan cheque can't be issued."

"Come again?"

"It'll take at least 24 hours to sort out and, as a result, your house purchase can't proceed as planned tomorrow."

So it's on to the solicitor to get everything - the purchase of our new house and sale of our old one - rearranged. In short, everything gets put back a week, and the buyer of our old house and vendor of our new one are rightly miffed (not to mention ourselves).

In addition, our contract with the removals company included a penalty clause of €1,000 for a cancellation less than 24 hours before the agreed date. So now we're down a grand in to the bargain!

Subsequently, we discovered that the mortgage company was aware of the life assurance problem for over seven weeks but had failed to inform us, despite being alerted to it twice by the life assurance company. The problem - due to us incorrectly filling in a figure on the application form - was subsequently corrected quickly.

We consoled ourselves with the thought that moving house isn't easy and nothing further could go wrong. A few days later we phoned our solicitor to confirm a few minor details.

"I'm afraid he doesn't work here any more," said the receptionist.

"Come again?"

"He's left . . . gone to work elsewhere. Somebody else will handle your file. Sorry."

The sale of our house had been a complicated matter due to a few "issues" regarding the property. It would take time for a new solicitor to familiarise themselves with the file. We feared further delays and were fuming that our original solicitor hadn't let us know that he was moving on. Our second solicitor, anxious to restore the firm's image, cleared her desk of all pending work to deal with our file. "Everything will go through on the rearranged dates," she told us later, as we'd decided to move out on Thursday and move in on Friday.

The day of moving out came. I brought two of my daughters to school, drove the wife and youngest nipper to the play group, and rushed home to find the removals company outside the door. Our things were packed by lunchtime and the van left. We woke up the following morning in my mother's house, excited at the prospect of moving in to our new home.

Then the phone goes . . . it's the solicitor. "The sale of your house has gone through, but we haven't received the deeds of your new house yet, so we can't complete that purchase today."

"Come again?"

"The solicitor for the vendor has put the deeds in the legal post. They should have arrived already, but we can't complete till we get them."

I pride myself on staying cool, keeping my head when everybody else is losing theirs, but just then the red mist came down, thickened into an impenetrable fog and I flipped. "I've three kids and a wife, all our belongings are in a truck, and now we've got no home to go to. DO SOMETHING!"

The solicitor, to her credit, talked the vendor into allowing us to move into the new house until the deeds turned up, which they did, only over two months later in another solicitor's office in Galway. Given that we live in Dublin and both law firms we were dealing with have their offices in the capital, we wondered how could this happen?

"The legal post is run on each legal firm having a number," our solicitor said, "and the solicitor for the vendor probably put the wrong number on the envelope."

When our nerves and family had settled in the new house, we decided to resolve some of the outstanding issues from the debacle of our house move.

First up - the mortgage company. We wrote to the branch manager and asked them to pay the removal company's €1,000 late cancellation fee and sought a goodwill payment for the trouble they'd caused us.

Two weeks passed without a reply. We sent the letter again. Another two weeks went by without a reply. We then phoned - three times - but all the calls went unreturned. It was only when we subsequently threatened to move our mortgage elsewhere that the manager replied. In short, it took another four weeks for it all to be resolved - the mortgage provider agreeing to pay us €1,250 in total.

We then contacted the Law Society. What did it make of our first solicitor's behaviour? While not wishing to prejudice any possible complaint, a spokesman for the Law Society said it would be an "extraordinary state of affairs for someone in any walk of life" to walk away from a business/client relationship without letting the other party know. It was "unusual, surprising, extraordinary" that it could happen.

The spokesman invited us to make a written complaint to the law firm concerned, for which we would be entitled to a written response and, if this response was unsatisfactory, to make a complaint to the Law Society.

As we'd already received profuse apologies from the firm concerned and were satisfied with the subsequent service, we decided to let the matter rest.

But now that the dust has settled from our house move, we can't help thinking that, of all the professional services we'd employed, it was the most expensive ones - lawyers and lenders - which performed the poorest.