Comments:
9 Months of frustration and continuing. . . . . Buying a Richmond American Home has been and continues to be the worst experience of my life. My house closed on time, but none of the items on the first walk thru list were addressed, and still haven't been addressed several months later. Buyer beware, don't buy a Richmond American home if you expect to have necessities like hot water and a working heater/AC when you move in, many other issues occured that most would deem the house to be inhabitable at closing. Things do not get fixed in a reasonable amount of time and with no degree of professionalism (they are unable to schedule appointments and keep them, as well as, schedule several crews to get a whole days worth of repairs done when you have to take the day off of work, mostly piece mealed scheduling and most of the times they don't communicate with their sub-contractors what needs to be done so the equipment and materials are never available to address issues within 1-2 visits some items have taken 4-5 visits from the same contractor and we still have an outstanding issue. Our house is treated as a construction site still and we have been disrespected several times by the contractors and the Richmond American representatives. There customer service/home warranty people have NO IDEA what customer service is, we have gotten the run around with this group of people and they trade us off to new people every few weeks delaying progress and messing things up with terrible transitions. Management does NOT stand behind their employees or their own word. I would love to have my house in the state it should have been at close, NOW!! Thanks to SB800 can't do much to motivate the builder to do anything since they are allowed to fix things with terrible quality within one year, I wonder how much money they invested to lobby for that bill so that they can get away with their horrible quality of work. So maybe next year this house will be less stressful and not such a mess. I could go on and on about this builder. They were ranked 80 out of 100 in Sacramento last year, my goal is to get them off the list!! They don't deserve to be allowed to conduct business in California. I have thought about putting a sign with flashing lights in my front yard saying Richmond Sucks, Buy Elsewhere!!! and calling the local news station, just to get them the bad PR they deserve. The thing with researching home builders is few people do it and most people would not buy a home just because builder has a poor reputation, you buy for the location and the floorplan hoping your home won't be the messed up one. Each community hires it own set of low caliber sub-contractors so homes can vary division to division. The one thing that can be consistent from community to community are the employees that work for Richmond if they stay around long enough to make it to the next community (super high attrition), they tend to be untrained for their job duties and not very practical at averting issues or addressing them when they arise, this is especially characteristic of their subsidiary mortgage company. Best of luck if you chose to get a RA home or if you are already stuck with one like me. If I could give any new RA home buyers some advise don't even talk to the mortgage people they ruin your home buying experience through lies and frustration, find your own loans you'll get a better deal, then when you have issues with your house you will have energy to address them and won't be so upset with RA.
