Sean Sullivan
1/5
I am writing this review so another person can avoid the experience with George Elias.
I cannot say this more sincerely - please avoid this company if you are doing any off the plan property work.
If I could give a zero-star review, I would.
I have run my company for 5 years and referred countless clients to legal representatives for property investment and development worth 10's of millions per year. We have a great team and work with new companies every day with no issues achieving a goal together.
I have come across George twice, recently, and not so recently – both times leaving me wanting to sage my own home.
If you care to read this, please see below:
The first client with George was a few years back, and when we finally achieved what we needed to, with enormous pain, I vowed never to work with this company again.
Recently, to my detriment, I had two clients who had chosen to use George Elias for their property investment... and it was a rinse and repeat experience.
While I had purged the memory of George from my mind, I instantly remembered George the second we spoke due to his rude tone and inability to listen to anyone else's voice or direction.
George is unbelievably condescending and controlling whilst being completely naive in relation to the work we were doing.
If you are in property, you will empathise:
We sourced two blocks for duplex developments and had custom plans made for both clients. These blocks were hard to come by, and sourcing a builder was even harder. We were stalling with the land agent as there was another purchaser who was only waiting on finance approval to exchange their land contracts. In short, we got a lot done in a short amount of time to pull this opportunity together for the clients.
While this was going on, George was ignoring the vendors legal team, ignoring the calls and messages left by the land agent, using up precious time (where we are buying each day as they come), ONLY to finally respond with a letter demanding the landowner pay for the DA application (duplex) and for settlement to occur once the DA was approved in 4 months.
As you’d understand there’s no incentive for the landowner to carry the DA costs and settle after we achieve the DA months down the track. The large profits in these investments come from improving the land value, and if the landowner were to do this, they may as well get the DA approval themselves and sell the land for more.
Putting you in the landowners’ shoes, would you: Pay $20k or so towards another person’s DA, while holding your block for 3 months or more (when you want and need to sell it the block now, we are currently at or near the bottom of the market), still covering your own repayments while you wait, to only improve your own lands value by at least 20%, to then sell it for the same price to the buyer.
There isn’t a person in the world that would accept those terms.
Both recent investments died, and we lost the clients (I’ll explain below). Though I’m sure George’s fee proposal was covered.
Each time George interacted with the clients, the clients would then start to treat us with mistrust. They would get defensive to communication as if anything we said was a sales tactic. It seemed to us that the clients were being directed not to listen to anyone but George.
As you would understand we would explain to the clients that we can only hold a block for a certain amount of time and there was a noticeable change in the client’s demeanour towards the team and our reminders to keep the process moving.
This created an environment where a group full of professional’s who first engaged the clients and put together the investment that brought George Elias the work, lost their voice in the process to someone who, I hope was doing this unbeknownst to themselves, was ruining the work we had put together. We could not convince the clients that the terms put forward were unrealistic - which would have been their first development/investment, now they're investment journey is stumped as no one anywhere will accept these terms.
