BetterBond? What Bond???

My husband and I app**** for a bond through Selan Naidoo at BetterBond for two investment units on the 9th of January 2018 - 13 weeks ago. We have yet to receive final confirmation of either bond.

There have been so many frustrating elements of this process. The first has been around communication. Selan and his team have been largely uncommunicative. Selan went away on holiday for two weeks and nothing was done to further process the application at the time. No one communicated with us and after about five weeks of nothing happening, I soon learnt that in order to get any sense of where the applications were sitting, I would need to send Selan a text message EVERY morning and follow it up with a phone call EVERY afternoon.

Also, Selan is unable to manage expectations. When I do talk to Selan he tells me that we should receive confirmation of an offer that day. 13 weeks later, you can imagine this is exhausting and hugely disappointing when nothing appears in your inbox.

Finally, I cannot count the amount of times in the last 13 weeks that Selan and team have come back and requested more documents. I think it’s fine for a bond originator to request additional documents once or twice but this has been the status quo of our interaction with BetterBond. As a result, Selan’s team comes across as unexperienced and unprofessional.

However it gets better. We tried to escalate Selan to his direct report at BetterBond and have not heard anything back. I suppose we would need to apply the same strategy of chasing them in order to get any information. Also even though we have not received a confirmation on either bond, we have offshoots from BetterBond such as BetterLife etc calling to sell us other products - life insurance, handyman services etc. We don’t even have the units!? The integration between the businesses is poor to say the least.

I can say this categorically as someone who intends to buy many more properties, I WILL NEVER USE BETTERBOND AGAIN. Ooba has never given us this problem and I intend to stick with them as they offer a consistent, speedy, professional service unlike BetterBond.

We are still locked into BetterBond until we are complete with our application unfortunately. I am so looking forward to the day when I no longer have to actively chase up on Selan and BetterBond.