London House News

We are delighted to advise that we are in the middle of training our newest Franchise Owner.
Alistair Howard joins us as the owner of the Liverpool franchise area. 

Alistair is an experienced bank executive at Director level, latterly Director Corporate Banking, Bank of Scotland (part of the Lloyds banking group) in the North West region. His CV includes heading the BoS Real Estate team and all round business banking experience. Alistair is ACIB qualified. I am sure you will all join me in wishing him every success within the London House network.

Further training courses are also booked in the diary for more new Franchise Owners and we will give more information next month.

April of course means that St George's Day is here again and as members of The St George's Day Club, we will be attending the celebrations at The Grosvenor Hotel on Park Lane with friends and clients of London House. More detail next month.

You asked us

"When using databases as part of your enquiries do you always use the Credit Reference Agencies and what databases do you search?"

We do not always use the CRA's. We can only access the CRA information when we, or our client, has signed agreement to that and that agreement includes the right for our client to pass on to a third party ie us. Most agreements of course are given when signing a credit agreement.

We use many databases, some proprietory, some public, along with many different websites, to access information. It is far from a comprehensive list but just some of the public record databases we may use would be:

Court Registry Trust

Telephone records

Land Registry

Companies House

Electoral Roll (edited version)

We may also need to contact any number of professional bodies that provide information such as The Law Society, British Medical Association and other registries etc.

Focus On........International work

It has been some time now since we rebranded to "International". This change was to reflect the growing levels of instructions we receive from our clients to undertake work overseas. On a daily basis we are receiving requests to begin work on instructions abroad.
We have a large and reliable network of agents around the world who work to the same high standards as ourselves and always within the relevant laws of the country in which they are operating.
We are able to provide a full range of services overseas including: trace, surveillance, discreet enquiries, asset investigations and process serving

It's not always bad news

A Solicitor client had a case whereby they needed to contact a subject in order to have a letter personally delivered to him. They had an address that they believed to be correct in Canada, but were not receiving any return contact from him when they wrote.
We were asked to trace the subject and, when found, send an agent to hand deliver the Solicitor's correspondence.

Our overseas agents completed the trace enquiries for us and were indeed able to confirm that, according to all records, the subject was living as stated, ie at the address we had been provided. With this information confirmed we then instructed our agents to personally attend at the address and serve the subject with the documents. This was not easy. As we know, Canada is a vast country and the subject happened to live in a remote part of the country in a small fishing village on the North Western shores. We can all picture the typical frozen, remote outback type village that we see on our TV screens.  

Our agent reached the village after an arduous journey and was greeted by the rather sceptical inhabitants of the place who perhaps may not view strangers as visiting for any good reason. We attended at the property and eventually met with our subject where the documents were served on him once he had confirmed his identification. He had been avoiding contact with the solicitors on the basis that they had not advised him of the reason for their interest and feared the worst. In fact, he was to be the recipient of a substantial sum of money.