When I first started looking at property investing we encountered Park Trent and went to one of their seminars. Everything seemed really great at their seminar and we booked a follow up session with one of their consultants for $100. The consultant came and took down our financial details and went off to find us a suitable property. When a suitable property was found we went to their head office in Melbourne and met their head honcho sales guys. We signed the contract of sale to buy an off the plan apartment on the same day subject to finance.

To cut a long story short, we weren't terribly impress with their service after we started to have doubts about our purchase. What really angered me the most was that they had not even taken our financials into consideration before looking for a property for us. There wasn't enough equity in our house for a 10% deposit and they wanted us to make up the short fall by taking out a personal loan to cover it! This to me indicated that they did not do their homework and were just in the business of selling and never had our best intentions at heart.

After a much lengthy battle with their customer service department we finally got all our money back which was about $2000. When we signed the contract we had to give them $2000 so that they could secure the apartment for us. At first they were going to only give back $1000. Later on we learnt that half of that money was paid to the brokerage team and that's probably why they were so reluctant to give it back to us because they had already used it. After threatening them with legal action and advising them that we would be taking this up with Consumer Affairs Victoria, we got all our money back.

So be careful. They seem genuinely interested in helping you build up a property portfolio but are really in the business to sell property.

Cheers.

Andy