If the Grinch were a title company, that company would be SKM. This Christmas, my wife and I had…read morethe misfortune of dealing with them. Though it was painful and frustrating beyond words, here's a few:
SKM apparently operates on a rotating shuffle of numerous distant teleworking employees, several of which apparently decided not to come to work, even remotely, on the contractual day of closing, Dec 23th. Having had made a good number of mistakes themselves along the way (like the property address), they had no problem making me jump through every conceivable hoop, to accommodate them and their last minute delay.
With every paper and every notarization they demanded in hand, I obligingly reported to their 'office' to close the deal, where I was brusquely met with an entirely new person who didn't take the trouble to introduce himself. Within a few minutes of sitting in a bare room, I had a phone thrust in front of me on speaker, with a highhanded voice talking at me, again without introduction. The voice, sounded like he was at a call center hundreds of miles (maybe south) of here. Within minutes, it was obvious that this man had no idea of the first thing about this deal (like the sale price) and clearly hadn't read the purchase and sales agreement. But that didn't stop him from running roughshod over the contract and imposing his own set of rules on the closing. Worse still, he attempted to justify his bullying with insults and defamatory innuendo . Based on the behavior of Jordan, the only person physically present, the man on the phone apparently instructed him not to conclude the transaction, as laid out in the contract, at that time.
Because the strange voice killed the deal within minutes from afar, my wife had to take two extra days off work, travel across New England, I had to extend the hotel stay three nights to make ourselves available to get this closed, in whatever way possible. In response to Maloney's denial of the closing Dec 24th, we also brought in an additional attorney to the transaction at the last minute. The tax prorations had to be redone and the utilities, insurance had to be extended,, increasing the cost of the deal and diminishing the seller's net proceeds. In the meantime, the buyers, who are good people, could not move in, as they had expected. I suspect the movers they had lined up had to be somehow rescheduled.
Jessica Cunha, the attorney who was most involved, herself devoted a good bit of mindshare to this deal, and seemed to genuinely care about getting it closed. She alone is the reason the review had been doubled from one to two stars.
However, she worked remotely and against the backdrop of a company whose top brass, based on our experience, has little respect for consumers, and less for contracts. The result was that the overall experience was a dread.
This year, the Grinch truly did steal Christmas ;~(
