What are your experiences with Richmond American Homes?

May 2, 2009 10:53 PM

What are your experiences with Richmond American Homes?

We're thinking about having a home built by Richmond American Homes (specifically something in the under $200,000 range in Gilbert, AZ) and we were wondering what the company is like. Have you dealt with them in the past? What are they like over the long term? Lots of details are very welcome.

Thanks!

posted by Xuff to home & garden (2 comments total)

We're learning the hard way that the doors and windows are not standard sizes. We needed to have a special order placed to replace the sliding glass screen door and then a special order to replace the front entry door, as neither turned out the be an off the shelf size.
posted by fnrindc at 9:47 AM on May 3

I don't have personal experience with them, but any of the "big" builders are going to have wide varying quality control depending on which area of the country their unit is under, the supervisor for that particular job, subs, etc. Because of arbitration clauses in the contracts, most of the complaints won’t be publicly available. Your best bet may be to walk around one of their neighbors in the area, see if you find someone watering the yard or something, and maybe strike up a conversation about their house. (We had some luck with that when we were searching for a builder.)

The one thing I did learn about them from the homebuilders forum is that Richmand is notorious for not following up on repairs, so you better make darn sure everything is fixed before you move in.
posted by texas_blissful at 10:39 AM on May 3