Bay Lakes Builders & Development

Review: We built our new house with Bay Lakes Builders and throughout the entire process we have been less than satisfied. The biggest problem involves the excavating company. We had requested a gravel driveway as we could not afford to put in a concrete driveway; however what we ended up with was a mostly sand covered driveway. We addressed this issue with the builders and received no response or proposal to fix it other than a cost that we would have to pay to get what we wanted. We have since had 2 truckloads of gravel put down that we are taking our valuable time and energy to disperse the gravel onto the driveway to save cost. We have not yet received a bill from the Casco company the delivered the gravel, but our estimate was $500.00. According to our builder the reason we were not able to get the driveway we originally requested was because the excavating company had already went over budget on our house. That is not our fault and now we are being punished for their issues. The excavating company also broke part of our well system (the builder did pay for this cost) and they did a less than adequate job on the grading – no top soil (which we are going to have to come up with money for at a later date) and a steep drop off that our driveway will slowly erode away into.

We have had several other issues with them throughout this process - change orders that were never written up front - involving beams that should have been in our house instead of 2x4 put together, we brought this up several times to the builders and no fixes. We also were told on numerous occassions that this was a Charity project (completely unacceptable as we we neve told up front that this was any sort of charity project), we were told we were the most difficult customers to deal with, and on numerous occasions practically yelled at on the phone by the builders. We have closed on this project over a month ago and have not received any feedback on a meeting that we are supposed to have regarding warrenty issues. We have windows in our house that are scratched significantly and we have asked to have these panes replaces as we just go to cleaning them two weekends ago and we were told by Bay Lakes there is nothing they can do. We have received our new damaged house, completely unacceptable.

I work in customer service and quality; I know how customers are supposed to be treated and just because we did not build a 2 million dollar house, does not give Bay Lakes Builders the right to treat us in this manor. We went with this company because they got us a good price and because we have heard good things from others who have built with them. Unfortunately based on our experience I would not recommend them to anyone and if I knew what I know now I would have choosen someone else.

It took our plumbers 5 trips to our house to install our bath tubs, because each time they installed them wrong.

There were numerous things discussed with [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] that were missed throughout this process.Desired Settlement: We would like to see Bay Lakes pay for the gravel that was quoted in our spec, that we had to pay for out of pocket ($500). We have already put labor into this project along with the cost to fix our incorrect driveway. We will not ask for reimbursement for our labor time, but just for the materials that should have been there to be covered.

We would also ask that all the window pains that are scratched be replaced.

We also would like to receive and understand all our warranty information on our new home, before everything is out of warranty, at the rate of communication from Bay Lakes we will never receive this information.

Business

Response:

This letter is in response to the complaint received from our customers, [redacted] and [redacted] in respect to their $500.00 dispute against our company.