Note: Originally posted 10/12/12 - moved to this new location due to high spam volume.
Here is my side of the story…
I thought I’d dealt with stress in my life, but this was a whole new level. We have NEVER paid SO MUCH money and been treated SO badly by anyone!! He was very unprofessional, very moody, very deceptive. He kept saying “I’m different than other builders”. We realized that meant “the rules don’t apply to me”. We had two close friends building with other builders at the same time as us. We constantly compared notes and they (and we) couldn’t believe how unfairly and unprofessionally we were being treated.
One big issue was not being able to go through the house whenever we wanted. No one we’ve talked to during or since had ever even heard of a builder who won’t let you go through the house whenever you wanted. If we showed up unannounced, we were met by his “bouncers”, who would physically prevent us from coming on the lot and immediately call him to warn him we were there. We were then turned away. If they weren’t there, the property is surrounded by a locked gate to which you will NOT be given a key.
More great quotes: “I’m free to interpret the architectural plans any way I want.” He never called us to ask “How..”. He just did whatever he wanted. Then when we pointed out he had not followed the plans, he would use this phrase and then say “If you want it changed, you pay”. When we commented it wasn’t a change, but a “correction”, he once again stated “I’m free to interpret the plans any way I want”. Our architect tried to reason with him, but gave up. He said in all his years of dealing with builders (and they can be an interesting bunch) he never had these kinds of problems.
Toward the end things were completely out of control. We finally just closed and got him out then spent even more money finishing the house, correcting problems, etc…
We wondered why he had targeted us, but after we moved in and began to talk to neighbors, we realized it wasn’t just us. We heard (and continue to hear two years later) story, after story, after story of people who had bad experiences with him. Funny as he kept telling us how the neighbors all loved him. Just ask the couple next door to us who complained to him when his people knocked over their fence in the process of putting ours up. He promised to fix it, never did, and then when they pushed the subject again, he questioned whether his people had even done the damage. Needless to say, the fence was never fixed.
After we moved in, a couple contacted us who were building with him and looking for advice on what to do as they were at their wits end. We compared stories and found our experiences were quite similar. They even got to the frustration point where they considered selling their house (which they designed to be their “dream house”) just because of all the bad karma they felt the house now had. They ended up doing the same as us, get him out and then suck up the add’l money to finish the house correctly.
I could go on for pages. He is definitely a wolf in sheep's clothing. He’s all smiles and nice when he’s selling, but a whole different side comes out once your name is on the bottom line. His signs were the only ones in neighborhood when we began the process, but now there are many quality builders in the area so move on to one of them and save your sanity… and your money!!!!
Note: Originally posted 11/10/12 by Jost - moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteThis sort of behavior from builders is not unusual but this guy seems worse than most. And he gets all kinds of publicity for being such a good guy. Jeez.
Note: Originally posted 1/10/13 by Jess - moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteWould you mind sharing some more specifics on the types of problems you had? i.e. did he build something lower quality than you had agreed? have there been any maintenance issues yet? was there a warranty and did he honor it? We’re thinking about dealing with him, and I would like to get a little more background. I see that he is not accredited with the BBB, and there has been one complaint against him on the BBB.
Note: Originally posted 1/22/13 by "Khoslas" - moved to new location due to high spam volume.
DeleteHi Jess,
The list is too long. Our idea was to add items over time on a regular basis, but have not been able to get to ti. Hard to define poor quality in some cases since we had to settle for an apple when we requested an orange :-).
So, just a couple of examples..
We had special spray jets that needed to be installed opposite the shower head. He put them on the side. The he said he could not move them but part of the way. And we had to pay for the move. So now we have it halfway there and are going to hire someone to come tear it down and fix it.
We had him install a under-sink wine cooler. He did not plan the counter height correctly and he had to put it in and then tile around it. So, for any servicing, now I have to remove the tile.
One master sink has already started falling down. We have to re-glue/seal it and re-support it.
We had a leak – luckily in the garage. Turned out to be a poor flashing job. We paid to have it redone.
Also had to redo network wiring terminations. Again, a poor job. Long list … There is no warranty after what we went through. In our opinion, he basically held the house hostage. We have heard that this is his normal mode near the end of the construction. Our choice was to fight it or pay the ransom. I personally was all for fighting it as a matter of principle but our lawyers basically advised paying and getting out of it because otherwise it would be even more financial and emotional burden. As part of the settlement he would not fix any of the open outstanding issues or honor any warranty.
Just know that it is impossible to have an iron-clad contract. So you have to have faith/trust at some level. We have heard that most construction projects are tough, but most people we have talked to (who have done something similar) say that he raises the bar to a new level :-).
Anyway, based on our experiences and our dealings with him, he is not capable of being trusted. He cannot own making any mistakes and correcting them. In our experiences, his demeanor when disputes arise, is that of a bully. Tough combination to deal with.
Deepak
Note: Originally posted 12/03/13 by 'Scammed by Fuckundo"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteSame bad experiences with Facundo here. Doesn’t return phone calls nor emails. Have you noticed he doesn’t give out employees phone numbers, doesn’t have an official office, only his residence that is protected by law? His only listed number is his mobile number so he can screen calls. This person is a scam artist. what a disgrace. Stay away from his restaurant when it opens, I am sure he will cut corners with the food and sanitary conditions once it opens. Be sure to get the word out to your neighbors, let’s make sure he doesn’t take advantage of more honest people.
Note: Originally posted 03/25/14 by 'Us Too"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteWe had a similar experience with him. Extremely difficult to work with, very poor at project planning and communication, huge ego. Charged to fix things that were clearly his mistake but what choice do you have, really? ‘Bully’ is a good description, and frequently not honest in his dealings with us. Very limited access to our house while it was being built. When we would ask people in the area about building with him, we would get this sort of knowing look, and were told he was ‘challenging’ or ‘difficult’ but that he builds a great house. My opinion and advice on the other side of it is that he is more difficult than you can imagine and NOT worth the trouble. Consider carefully before you sign with him.
Note: Originally posted 03/27/14 by 'DK"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing. I think one factor is that a lot of people hear that ‘building a house and dealing with builders is a pain’. So, with that mindset, they tend to underestimate how bad it can be. Also, I am not sure how many people even check references. They look around and see a couple of Facundo homes under construction and assume, ‘if he is building houses in this neighborhood, he must be good and respected’. We fell into that trap. Just never saw the blood he left inside the houses. Hopefully, over time, enough people will share their experiences and the word will get around. Since then, we have talked to a few people who built homes with other builders, and I no longer believe that ‘all builders are a pain to work with’ - but Facundo definitely is #1 in the ‘pain’ category.
Note: Originally posted 03/29/14 by 'Us Too"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I also notice (in hindsight) that he has no customer testimonials/comments on his website as the others do. Now I understand why. He is an unpleasant and dishonest man. I am curious though why there haven’t been more complaints submitted to BBB given the number of screwed/mistreated customers in his wake. We plan to submit one soon. Seems like that’s a resource folks use when checking out builders.
Note: Originally posted 03/30/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteWe also filed one with the BBB. Naturally, he is not registered with them so they take no action. People may not realize they can still leave complaints about vendors who are not listed with BBB
Note: Originally posted 06/06/14 by "DRJ"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteWe selected Facundo to build our house, based on his supposed reputation in the Garden Oaks area. The experience was not at all what we expected from him. He was extremely difficult to work with, and often rude and unprofessional in his communications with us; not as he portrayed himself to be in his advertisements or in the period before we signed the contract.
It took him 19 months to build our house. The day we were scheduled to close, he sent us an amendment releasing him from all warranties and legal liability. When we refused to sign it, he told our mortgage broker and title company that he was not going to sell the house to us, and that he already had another buyer. He replaced the ’sold’ sign in front of our house with a ‘for sale’ sign a few hours later.
He never actually terminated our contract (he had no legal basis to do so), but we had to hire an attorney to incent him to sign the closing documents. Less than a week after moving into our house, the entire sewer system backed up. Our plumber needed to find the sewer cleanout, but was unable to because MF had buried it 3 feet underground (in violation of city code). The cause of the back up? (1) MF failed to replace the last 10 feet of 60-year old concrete pipe between the cleanout and the city main line (the pipe was cracked and filled with tree roots), and (2) his plumber had let a test ball loose in the pipe which lodged itself in the tree roots. Expensive repair, for which he has taken no responsibility.
Other unexpected outcomes from this ‘High Caliber Home Builder’… automatic gate opener didn’t work when we moved in, he refused to install most of our cabinet knobs, any bathroom hardware, and several of our light fixtures; fireplace brick installed that was not what we had selected, closet doors in the master bath were too wide to close, kitchen trash bin drawer had a solid piece of plywood on it and no holes cut for trash bins, cracked kitchen backsplash tile, beverage center not installed, light fixtures that didn’t work, extra electrical work paid for but not completed, driveway was poured too close to the property line so failed City inspection (we didn’t find this out from MF, we discovered it from the City online permitting and inspections website; if we hadn’t learned of it before closing and settled it with the City ourselves, we wouldn’t have been able to turn on our utilities).
From his website: “you’ll be welcome to visit the site of your home whenever you wish”…not at all true for us. We had extremely limited access to our house, losing many opportunities to truly customize it. We were allowed inside the house only twice during the last 6 weeks of construction despite a significant amount of final construction activity occurring. The second of these ended with MF losing his temper (after we raised an issue with our tile allowance, more below), and telling us to get out of the house or he would ‘call the cops’.
He was not transparent in the allowance charges. We had to ask several times for documentation to support our tile allowance deductions before he produced it, and once he did, it was apparent that he had ordered much more tile than was necessary in several instances. We never received an explanation for this, nor ever saw a credit for the extra tile, nor had boxes of extra tile left at the house that we could return ourselves despite multiple requests on our part.
We wanted to do our own landscaping, and he refused to give us credit for our landscaping allowance, instead purchasing and installing bushes that we told him many times we didn’t want.
Continued from DRJ -
ReplyDeleteOur house was finally finished 7 months after the date specified in our contract, which already had allowed him a year to complete a 3,500 sq ft house. He blamed us, the City, the utility companies, whomever, for the delays; the fact is, he started several houses at approximately the same time as ours that were finished at about the same time. He is the common denominator. I believe the increase in market value between when we signed the contract and when we finally closed is what motivated his attempts to scuttle the deal so he could find a new buyer at a significantly higher price. There was a clause in our contract that allowed him to terminate it if the relationship between the parties became ‘unsupportable’, and it is our opinion that much of his incredibly unprofessional behavior toward us was intended to bait us into reacting so that he could use this as a basis to terminate the contract.
This was our experience. If we had known what working with him would be like, we would have chosen a different builder. There are plenty of good alternatives in the Garden Oaks/Oak Forest area now.
Note: Originally posted 06/09/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteThanks for adding to the blog. Your experience brings back such bad memories. The whole “hold the house hostage at the end” thing is definitely his style. I wish everyone we’ve talked to would post here. The blog would be incredibly long and stay high on the Google post when people check on him. I feel so bad every time I see one of his signs go up. I know that means another family is about to have one of the worst experiences of their lives.
Note: Originally posted 06/17/14 by "DRJ"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteI’m curious what your ‘holding hostage’ experience was. Your choices were to pay for a finished house that was unfinished or walk away from it? BTW, this is his lawyer that our attorney dealt with just a few months ago:
http://txboda.org/cases/ricardo-baca-v-commn-lawyer-discipline
Note: Originally posted 06/18/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteToward the end when things were very bad and we had lawyers involved, they had an exchange with his lawyer in which we were warned MF could sell the house to another buyer at any price (even a relative for peanuts) and sue us for the difference in contract price and sales price. He was refusing to hang light fixtures, put in cabinet hardware, etc. without more money for yet another trumped up reason why the types of things we bought required more effort than he planned. We put a lien on the house (due to the huge $$ we already had in it with his upgrade charges) to prevent this. Our lawyers advised this guy and his attorney were bad news and we’d save money and sanity by just closing on an unfinished house and getting him out before he tried something like selling it. doesn’t shock me the lawyer has problems with the state bar.
Note: Originally posted 07/05/14 by "Garden Oak Resident"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteIs there any way for the Garden Oaks association stop advertising him in the Gazzette?
Note: Originally posted 07/09/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteI would think businesses pay to advertise in there so unless his “type” of business was not considered family friendly (eg. strip club) I doubt they will turn down ad revenue.
Note: Originally posted 07/20/14 by "Not Surprised"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteThese comments are very enlightening. I had no idea of the extent of his methods and ethics and am sorry anyone has had to deal with all of these issues! From the number of his signs around the neighborhood, I had assumed he had a decent reputation and appreciate the insight of your experiences. It seems that the word needs to get out to more people to save them from facing the same challenges and difficulties.
I have had some non-building dealings with him also and found him difficult also and his occasional contributions to the neighborhood seem to end up causing difficulties for those involved with dealing with him as well (but on a much lesser scale, but still enough to generate some negative perceptions). Just from those minimal dealings, I would never consider patronizing any of his businesses. Also, the traffic that his business generates due to being run from his home seems to be something his near neighbors would object to. Having all of the workers’ trucks around day in and day out would seem to violate deed restrictions (running a business from your home) as well as disrupt the expectation of peace and quiet of the surrounding neighbors.
Note: Originally posted 07/23/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the delayed post. I’ve been out of pocket for the last week. Thanks for supporting the blog. This is a good way to get the word out and the more posts we have the better. It doesn’t surprise us he’s hard to deal with even outside the building process.
Note: Originally posted 08/12/14 by "Local Builder"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteI get incensed every time I see this kind of stuff written about Facundo. It blows my mind that he continues to be able to treat people this way. My partner and I have built many homes in Garden Oaks and we are very sensitive to any negative customer feedback.
Building homes is not easy and there will typically be some unpleasant moments, but on balance we expect our customers to have a positive experience and we regularly hand out our portfolio to potential clients and invite them to contact all former clients.
Ultimately, Miguel is able to treat people badly because people, for whatever reason, put in less due diligence to hiring a home builder than they do buying a toaster off of Amazon. It happens with us, people call us, we meet and then they hire us without ever checking our references. The other tactic that Miguel incorporates that ultimately puts him in control is that he owns the house until closing…….so you cannot fire him. Any builder that insists on owning the land and house until closing should be treated with suspicion.
Note: Originally posted 08/13/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteYou hit it right on the money. We fell into his trap with excuses as to why we couldn’t talk to former clients (they’ve already sold (made big profit), he protects his clients privacy, they travel a lot and are not available, etc.). We fell back on the fact he lives in the neighborhood and surely would not risk bad publicity. We were so wrong. Houston is big and he can always find clients. It was probably the worst part of the whole thing - feeling like such idiots for not digging into him more. We are certainly glad to see all the other builders that have started building in the area.
His was the only sign we ever saw in 2009 when we were looking. That’s the purpose of the blog - to hopefully get the word out there. Thanks for contributing. Each comment bumps us up on a Google search of him!! Best of luck to you guys!!
Note: Originally posted 01/17/14 by "Khoslas"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteFound another review location:
http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Facundo.Home.Builder.713-681-5572/review/read?cid=1605646
Note: Originally posted 03/16/15 by "Amy"- moved to new location due to high spam volume.
ReplyDeleteI too, have experienced Facundo Homebuilders unprofessional practices, shoddy workmanship, lack of response to my requests, and emails. Have you ever woken from a nightmare dream and thought -I am glad it was only a dream ?. My Facundo Homebuilders nightmare is real and continues to this day. I am not at liberty to discuss particulars at this time ,but will follow up soon with more information. SAVE YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY,and the most important investment you will make -YOUR HOME —–YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED I am thankful for this blog ( unfortunately I found only after my nightmare had begun). Were it not for this blog I would be alone. My sincere thanks .
Amy, please contact Patrick Drake at Hoover Slovacek. He will be able to assist.
ReplyDeleteClearly he has not changed his ways at all. I hope you found some solution to your difficult situation, Amy and I hope people do their due diligence before hiring this monster. I have never heard of anyone with less scruples than an alley cat. There are so many other builders now in the neighborhood like Alleanza, Venice, Royal Texas who are building a number of homes in the area, with glowing reviews and excellent customer service. I don't understand how this guys isn't bankrupt yet. It is baffling!
ReplyDeleteAgreed with the previous poster, but, when we drove around the neighborhood looking at lots many years ago, it was just Facundo, Justin Gordon and Venice that were in GO/OF. Now, we cannot even count how many more builders have come into the area. We see Alleanza all over GO/OF and in West U as well.
ReplyDelete