I had to deal with this company via the person who wanted to buy my condo. As the seller, the onus was on me to obtain required documents and pay my management company for said documents. A couple hundred dollars later and I send my realtor what is needed for this review.
A week later, they come back asking for more documents. Most of these had already been submitted to them. So are they not doing a thorough job if the docs are right in front of their face and they missed them? If I had hired this company, I would be concerned.
In addition, there are items requested that are not applicable to all properties (Recreation Report, Lease Report come to mind). On this company's checklist of document, it does in fact state beside these and others that they are to be submitted only if applicable. Unfortunately, this did not appear to be the case. I was asked to provide documents for items that were already advised to be not applicable, and pay for each document individually for the Management company to type 1 sentence. Had I known that this would have been a requirement upfront, I could have paid 1 fee (instead of several) to have the Management company draft 1 statement stating the following requested items are not applicable to this condo corporation. Then it would have not resulted in delays in getting the buyer the information they needed to make a decision. It also causes extra unnecessary work to the Management Company and extra costs to myself.
When the time came for me to purchase another condo, I went with a completely different document review company, who didn't come back two and three times asking for more documents. It was done within 2 business days and i was happy with the results.
On another note, not related specifically to this company, the buyer should be footing the entire bill of the condo document review AND the cost to obtain documents. The exception being the Estoppel certificate, which is costly and should still be provided by the seller. The Estoppel Certificate is mandatory.
But as the condo document review is an optional service (like a home inspection), the buyer should pay for all costs. When I bought my new condo, I would have gladly paid for the documents being obtained as well as the service to review them, not sure why the seller has to be the one to pay for the docs to be reviewed. This should be changed. read more