We hired this firm initially for a large renovation project, but had to walk away pretty quickly into the project. They came and saw the house, did thorough walk throughs, and met with us to understand our budget and goals (max $200k budget, but we agreed to aim for $150k to be comfortable). We agreed to proceed with them and a couple weeks after providing a $10,500 deposit they provided us with a detailed estimate for over $360,000. Knowing we didn't have that kind of money we asked for other options...and were told "maybe we should just sell the place"!
Needless to say we couldn't continue working with them when the initial estimates had already doubled before the work even begun. We were relying on this contractor to only take the job if he could work with our budget and had a few meetings about this before signing the contract...so to hear that shortly after handing over the cheque was a shock.
We were very discouraged to be out the $10,500 deposit, which was not refunded, but at least we found another fantastic contractor who did it the project we wanted on the budget we could afford (with higher end specs than SouthPark had included in their $360k estimate I should note).
Would not recommend this team at all...awful start to our project and we lost a significant amount of money....it was a very expensive estimate and set us back two months in the project when we had to go find a new contractor.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $200,000.00
- Company Response
At South Park Design Build one of our primary goals is to have transparency with respect to communication and costing of projects. To that end we strive to supply any of our clients with extremely detailed costing documentation. As part of the initial planning stage of any project we offer 1. Interior designer 2. draftsman to do structural plans including engineers approvals and permit acquisition 3. A line by line item detailed pricing for proposed plans typically a 10-12 page document detailing every conceivable expense on any given project. This document also typically includes the backup trade quotes to validate our Estimate. This is one level of transparency, all quotes that come into our office are provided to the client as part of their pricing package, It is not industry standard to show clients this information. In this particular case the clients agreed to pay for the items detailed above and were supplied with interior designers detailed plans including several differing layouts, structural plans drafted and stamped by an engineer, and given a city stamped set of drawings with the construction permit, as well as our costing package. These are the items that were covered in the initial deposit. above and beyond that there were some 50+ hours spent in assembling our costing package as well as meeting and discussion with various city officials including fire marshal to investigate options for a legal rental unit and access challenges for first responders.
Our goal is always to provide our clients with a realistic costing of their proposed plans. Sometime the end costing isn't what the client wants to hear, but we know it to be realistic for what's been proposed in the initial planning stage. We make every effort to include a full scope of costing at the onset of a project so that a client knows up front what to expect. One of the most common complaints we hear about contractors is that the client was "told what they wanted to hear" that a project could be completed for a certain price, then once the house is under construction the realistic costs become apparent.
We are happy to hear that a suitable contractor was found to do the work to the clients needs. I would be interested to see how closely the end result matches the initial "blue sky" list of wishes we were given to work with.
South Park Design Build