I too have been a victim of Kensington.
They repossessed my home in March 2006. They breached the mortage code by not making an arrangement with us when we called to say we might have difficulties making full
mortgage
payments (at that stage we had no arrears) Their response was "pay up full payment this month or we will take legal action". As we fell further and further behind they loaded us with arrears fees and debt counsellor fees, even though no one ever called on us or left a note to say they had w hile we were out.
The repo order was made and suspended as long as we made full payments plus (quite) a bit off the arrears every month. We managed this for about 4 months, but it was too much. The house was on the market the whole time, but didn;t sell.
I queried the arrears fees and some other anomalies on the account and they were ordered by the judge to go through it with me. They never did, so I went back to court but they didn't turn up,and the judge said don't push it or they will charge you their legal fees and you will be worse off, so I left it (instead of asking for a judgement in default which I should have done as they did not contest my application!)
Eventually we were repossessed even though the day before the court hearing where they were granted possession we had received an offer on the house (they refused us permission to complete the sale unless it could be guaranteed within 4 weeks) and now Optima(their legal people) are chasing us for £34k.
I asked for a
Breakdown
which was incomplete and in Aug 08 asked for full details by 15 Aug or I would assume they had made a mistake and that we owe nothing. I have just had a reply (Nov 08!!! is that a breach of Data Protection??) with some more info and suggesting they might take a lower settlement from us!!
I intend to challenge the arrears fees, using all the helpful advice here, and also the early redemption charge (10k!). Any advice about the legality of ERC would be really helpful to me.
I am also questioning why they did not make best efforts to sell the house (my friend phoned the agents posing as a buyer for that kind of house in that area and it was not offered to her), did not rent it out during the year it was with them, did not maintain it (no gardening done during that time) and did not allow us to continue with our sale at the time.
Thanks for all the posts here - they are really inspiring!! If Kensington had acted fairly, we would have sold our house, cleared the
mortgage
and had 20k left over. Instead we have a black mark on our credit file and no money.
Any more helpful advice would be most appreciated.