MAES notaries: Just a little bit different

Besides being a lawyer, Janssen holds a degree in business administration and a master's degree in real estate. This briefly illustrates MAES's business philosophy. Janssen: "Involving a civil-law notary early on in a project or case is indeed becoming increasingly logical and is becoming increasingly common. In the municipality of Amsterdam, for example, a real estate purchase contract isn't drawn up by the real estate agent, but at the notary's office. This is because the purchase agreement stipulates the obligations that are then imposed on the buyer in the deed of transfer at the notary's office. If the purchase agreement isn't sound, or if something has been overlooked, the notary still has to resolve the deficiencies. This leads to extended processing time and higher costs. You can prevent this by involving a leading legal expert in real estate, the notary, in the process. This makes the entire transfer process and its resulting legal consequences much safer and more efficient than if you only go to the notary for the signing."

Partner of the client
Having said this, Janssen immediately adds that not all civil-law notaries are the same. And therefore, not every civil-law notary advocates the approach of MAES Civil-Law Notaries. Janssen: "We are a full-service civil-law notary office for individuals, businesses, and government bodies throughout the Rotterdam-The Hague metropolitan area, specializing in corporate law, real estate, and family law. We take a holistic approach, as we like to call it. For example, I myself am not only a lawyer, but also a business and real estate expert. I was the first MRE civil-law notary in the Netherlands and also have an MBA. Together, we have several centuries of experience here at the office. Our goal is to think along with the client, often professional parties, to anticipate, preempt, and resolve any problems they encounter during a project or transaction."

We are truly our clients' partners. We've consciously chosen not to focus on a specific niche, but rather to serve our clients across the board. These areas of law—corporate law, real estate, and family law—often cannot be viewed in isolation. The profit from a real estate transaction may well lie in the way you structure it technically from a tax or corporate perspective. Real estate can never be completely separated from corporate law. If you look further, you'll see that there are many enterprising real estate companies who also want to safeguard their private assets. Unlike many large firms, we do this with passion and pleasure. We can also advise our clients on the transfer of assets to future generations, ensuring the continuity of your business, your real estate company.

Speed, efficiency
Despite all the shades of gray, MAES Notarissen is also trying to bring some color to the notarial profession, says Geert Janssen, by distinguishing itself through speed, service-oriented approach, and proactiveness. Janssen: "We also believe it's important to innovate. One of the reasons we're such a successful firm is our strong commitment to automation, which allows us to produce quickly and efficiently at lower costs. Moreover, this reduces the risk of errors. Thanks to this automation, clients can also track the progress of their files online, in real time."

We also employ strict product management. We've created a workflow for each type of case, outlining all the steps involved in that process, project, and transaction. This ensures we don't overlook anything, minimizes the risk of errors, and ensures we have established communication channels with the client, who can follow everything. As a result, we not only process far more documents than our peers but also achieve exceptionally high customer satisfaction.
We strive for an empathetic approach, where our position as notaries isn't paramount, but rather the question of what's on the other side of the table? How does a developer think, how does a housing corporation think, how does an investor think, how does a user think? This approach, I believe, allows us to offer even better problem-solving skills. We're close to our clients and strive to share our knowledge with them, for example, through our newsletter covering interesting notarial topics, through free knowledge sessions at our office, and by posting YouTube videos on our website explaining all sorts of notarial, legal, and tax topics. I think it all perfectly illustrates our slogan, "Well done."

Finally
The joy of achieving excellent results also lies in the opportunity to invest significantly in your own business, Janssen explains. "We don't need a bigger boat or a faster car, but we do believe it's important to invest in the building we're in, in marketing and communications, in information technology, in our people, and the training they can take. This allows us to guarantee continuity, but also ensures that our turnover rate is much higher than at many other firms where they've made different choices."

This article previously appeared on Vastgoedjournaal: https://vastgoedjournaal.nl/nieuws/69909?