EYE has learned that a redundancy process has begun at conveyancing company Simplify – the Leicester headquartered firm that provides services to, among others, Purplebricks.
Simplify includes the brands of: Advantage Property Lawyers; Cook Taylor Woodhouse; DC Law; Gordon Brown Law; JS Law; Moving Made Easy; Move with Us; My Home Move; and Premier Property Lawyers.
A letter to affected staff, seen by EYE, says that the company has to make ‘some very difficult decisions… to ensure the continued strength of Simplify in these very challenging economic times.’
It is not yet clear which brands of Simplify are affected nor how many staff in total are affected but it is understood the consultation process will begin on December 5th.
The ‘at risk’ letter says that:
‘An inflation driven cost of living crisis, significant interest rate rises (with more to come) and downward pressure on house prices, have created massive uncertainty in the UK housing market.
‘The general view is that the housing market cycle has ‘peaked’ and prices will come down and, more importantly for Simplify, the number of people buying and selling are expected to be very significantly lower for at least the next 12 months.
‘Despite Simplify’s strength as a business we cannot be immune from such large reductions in activity in the UK property market, so we need to take some important actions to ensure that our cost base is sustainable at much lower volumes of case activity.’
The letter goes on to say the company has taken actions to mitigate the impact, such as: increasing income per case, carefully managing our costs, generating more conveyancing instructions, pausing recruitment of non-critical roles but then says:
‘However, the outlook is now so significantly reduced that we have no choice but to propose redundancy for a number of roles.’
Simplify has been approached for comment.
The firm was in the news only last month after it was revealed that the serious data breach in 2021, which paralysed the company for an extended period, had also likely resulted in the personal details of past and present staff being exposed.
Simplify data hack compromised personal data, investigation reveals
If there wasn’t already reason enough to avoid prospective buyers using PPL and their ilk, this redundancy process is really going to have a negative impact on exchange times.
Sorry for those affected.
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Sorry but no.
We’ve had terrible service across the board from all manner of Conveyancing Factories like these. I daresay that the REAL cause of the redundancies is lack of instructions referred by agents who are just pig sick of the slow service and lack of updates from companies like these.
And with these redundancies, the already overworked staff are going to be even more overworked, so things aren’t exactly going to get any better, are they?
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Well ain’t you nice! No sympathy for those that might be jobless in a month or two.
let me know which company you work for so I can avoid them!
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Sympathy for those affected clearly goes without saying. Perhaps I should have mentioned it – in fact I should have.
However for those who, like you, have missed the point, all the sympathy in the world doesn’t change the fact that they are most likely in this position because of the poor service that their bosses have chosen to provide in order to provide those services on the cheap.
Those workers have had no choice but to cut out giving updates to estate agents. No choice but to make clients wait forever for things, due to having unsustainable case loads forced upon them. No choice but to miss and forget things because they’re having to rush individual cases. No choice but to make poor decisions due to lack of training and experience.
All this, because their employers have chased a “pile it high and sell it cheap” policy.
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The 1st time staff, who were not affected by the consultation process, heard about any redundancies occurring was via this news article.
There could be a vast amount of people without jobs in a few months time during a period of great uncertainty.
I hope those affected are supported through this difficult time.
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We have a first time buyer using this [Word removed as it breached posting guidelines], persuaded by his mortgage broker. Sale agreed on an empty flat in August, every attempt to get an update is ignored, I am relying on the buyer who has access to a portal which is updated, ah, hang on a minute it isn’t updated! As a consequence everyone is in the dark!
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Always sad news when people lose their jobs. Especially at this time of year.
However, at our business we are seeing a 40% fall in sales volumes and if this is happening up and down the country there is going to be a lot less transactions next year. Any business who loses a massive slice of workload must sensibly look at their resource levels in that situation.
We have worked with Simplify for a few years now and aside from the data breach issue (Which was tricky to navigate) have been a good business partner.
We work closely with our panel of solicitors through Simplify and get a great service from the panel in general.
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