*Unless you enjoy stupid questions, being patronised, and just generally poor, argumentative customer service, avoid Gavin Hockett at Romford Balgores* Unfortunately I am forced to give 1 star due to there being no option for less. I don't think anyone in a customer facing role has incensed me more than Gavin at Balgores, Romford. As a previous customer of Balgores, Hornchurch I instinctively called the team there, not even thinking about the fact the property I was interested in would be listed at the Romford branch. Effectively Gavin was given a packaged sale, having had no input in the negotiation, finance, even booking the viewing, he did not earn his fee at all. The Hornchurch team had the entire sale wrapped up within one weekend, their in-house Mortgage guy Peter Walker was excellent (again) and Dee who handled the rest was also efficient and pleasant. After all of the hard work was done I was handed over to Gavin at Romford, not a problem…or so I thought. After chasing the progress a few times, a couple of weeks later, the survey came back £23k under value. I informed Gavin that I would need to wait until the result of the referendum before I could consider the next step and that I understood if the seller re-listed, at that point the result was in 2 days. The seller decided to re-list the day before the referendum results, I did not find this out via Gavin but because it came up on my Right Move app…cheers for the update Gav! At this point dealing with Gavin has become a complete farce. Whilst trying to save the deal, which I fully appreciate, he asked if I could meet the seller in the middle which I was happy to do but explained that all of my savings were used up in the deposit and stamp duty, his response was ....."Do you not have a spare £10,000?" Honestly I had no idea how to answer this ridiculous question so I ignored it. Did he think that somehow this stroke of genius would spark a memory that I did in fact have a spare £10k kicking about in a draw somewhere?? Ludicrous! Shortly after this I received a letter to say that I had withdrawn, I called to ask this to be amended as this would affect my payment protection, Gavin was on holiday and he would have to call me back. I called again in 3 weeks and managed to speak to Gavin, needless to say that I received no apology for not returning my call, he simply shrugged it off that he had not received my message. I asked Gavin to re-issue the letter stating the fact that the vendor withdrew but all he was interested in was arguing the fact with me. I could not understand why he did not wish to assist me in this matter, he argued so much about it it made me wonder whether he would be losing some kind of referral fees or something?? His tone was arrogant, contrary, unprofessional and quite frankly he sounded like he just couldn’t be bothered to deal with me now that I was not lining his pocket with my elusive £10k. After a lot of arguing and Gavin repeating “but you did withdraw”, we settled on me forwarding him a list of things I need for the payment protection, including said amended letter. Gavin instructed an administrator to send me the documents including the letter which (obviously) was the original letter I had…..utterly tiresome. Eventually I called Peter at Hornchuch to help me, the letter I required was issued right away. Moral of this story is that, unless you are balling with rolls of money to help possibly one of the laziest sales people I have ever had the displeasure to deal with save his commission from falling through, ask for anyone other than Gavin. On a side note if anyone wants to donate to my “help bridge the gap” fund please see my gofundme page, I only need £10,000… thank you.