Final Grade and Landscaping - Quality Work, Best Pricing
River Valley did an amazing job on the final grade (easy pass by the inspector); and landscaping. A lot of options available, including curbing. Marianne was responsive to emails and calls; and extremely patient with constant design changes even at the 11th hour. I would highly recommend this company. Easy, transparent and fair pricing for high quality work.
Good upfront service, quality of material and third party workmanship suspect
Dealing with Landmark front end staff was amazing. Rommel (Walker Lakes) is a fantastic sales rep who actually helped get us into a home with everything we needed and wanted. He showed genuine care in dealing with our complicated situation and is everything you’d hope Landmark represents. Deeksha stepped up as well during the process. Jeanette (Sherwood Park) on the other hand - first thing she will try to do is tell you how much the house is and determine how much you’re willing to spend. A classic, take you for your money kind of salesperson. We built in Sherwood Park and dealt with folks in the Southside (OK, we are from the Southside but) - goes to show the lengths we went to avoid the sales rep (who actually works in the model we built). Moving onto the gorgeous design centre. Great selections and great standard selections to choose from. Deirdra gave us suggestions and let my wife do her thing. Patience and helpfulness made what may have been a tedious process, fun! Steve, the construction foreman in Sherwood - amazing personal skills, even greater time management skills. He is on his game, ensuring the house from a construction perspective was built to his standard. He made no promises on timeline, given the unpredictable weather we were having. Despite, he runs a right ship and got us into our house right on time. Here’s where it goes south. Everything Landmark direct has been great, with the exception of two main things: warranty and third party providers. The construction of the house, sound so far. Third party installs and specifically heating and plumbing - constant issues. Habberjam Mechanical has done a poor job installing - they even have admitted and documented human error as the cause of a furnace issue in December. See my review of Habberjam Mechanical for further details. Inconsistent heat in winter, inconsistent water temperature, leaking parts (two solenoids failed within days). Appliances are showing issues (maybe our fault for sticking with Whirlpool). Warranty is doing the best they can on the bigger issues, but when it comes to a system(s) that should be running reliably 6 months in - “oh, that’s normal. We will send a technician over to fix it.” Does anyone check or expect to check their basement daily for water wasting to drain?...especially, after the problem had been “fixed” days before? In short, go to Landmark for the customer service. Their third party quality and reliability is highly suspect. And their Warranty Department hot and cold. As it is with a lot of companies, once they get your money - they will have zero issues abandoning you later. Previous home was built with Parkwood - 9 years in that house with virtually zero issues. The only issues was replacing two circuit boards in appliances due to power surges living in a new area. Maybe I shouldn’t hold Landmark wholly accountable for their contractors’ mistakes, but to some degree there must be a reasonable expectation Landmark performs some QA/QC on companies that may be dialing it in after signing that big contract. Update: No Landmark's fault, but a lot of appliances and quality of material showing early signs of problems (Oven not preheating without a timer, washer leaking, LED disk light out).
New built home. Furnace was showing problems keeping up with temperature during cold snap. I called after hours to come in but the tech claims, it’s still running, it can wait. Called the builder, who tried to expedite the claim. Tech calls, asks me why his boss is calling and repeats, it’s still running, it waits. Kudos to Shane, GM, for apologizing on the tech’s behalf and probably setting him straight. (Re: We have to put your claim as low priority as you still have heat. Given the abnormal weather, we have to prioritize other calls). Multiple visits to fix problem. Solution: a pump was commissioned improperly. In a joint agreement, Habberjam has cited human error as the cause. As a new home owner, simply unnerving. Since then, and actually day one - we still have issues with inconsistent heating and inconsistent water temperature. It takes the kitchen sink, if we are lucky more than 5 minutes to get hot water. The showers start hot and will plummet to cold. Basic troubleshooting shows no blockages in internal/external lines. This problem is yet to be looked at. Solenoid valves on the humidifier have failed. Actually, one is failed right now, sending wasted water straight to drain. (I have isolated) And on both occasions with me not knowing for how long. It seems unreasonable to have to check my basement for abnormalities everyday, but that seems to be the norm on this Heating and Plumbing install by Habberjam. Other notes: techs were chatting about another tech rushing a job to completion so a house can turnover on time. I would question the quality of installation, product and reliability of anything Habberjam gets their hands on. They have done a good job trying to salvage the relationship by sending personable and knowledgeable techs for all the endless housecalls on a BRAND NEW system. But for all it’s worth - that could simply be them doing PR work for themselves having a huge contract with Landmark Homes. From my perspective, it looks like they’ve signed a guaranteed contract and dialed it in. And now that I have made noise with their guarantors, their complacency is temporarily shifting.
