Mattamy Homes – Florida isn’t too happy either

On one of my blogs I asked the question: “Why do I do this blog?”.   Someone has visited this blog and gave a very lengthy comment to this particular blog.  The one thing that bothers me about this comment is that they are not alone in their problems with Mattamy Homes, but it is hard to get your story out, considering how the mainstream press take the advertising but don’t really look into these stories..  Now, if Mattamy Homes believes that this comment is not just or is totally incorrect or, a lie, then they can contact me with their side of the story.  Just for the record, I have not verified this comment but, based on how Mattamy Homes treated me and my family, I am at least willing to share it with others so that they can make an informed decision on whether or not a house inspector is justified.  You know my story is true, so at least the hiring of a house inspector is justified.  If the following is true, it only goes to show how important it is to protect your investment.  We know the municipality won’t (at least the Town of Oakville).  Bracebridge and now Florida – not a good running record.

 

I live in a Mattamy home in Jacksonville, Florida (unfortunately they’re now infiltrating the US with their shoddy workmanship) and it is the WORST and MOST EXPENSIVE home I have ever owned. It makes me sick to think of how much this brand new house costs and the all the problems it has. The company helps when you first move in but makes out like you’re the one creating the problems and they have no idea how these things happen. This house is in a new subdivision and Mattamy will throw a house up in a few weeks and put a sign up that it’s for sale. Our home was built two years ago and as soon as we moved in, we began to have troubles. The electrical plates were screwed on the walls crooked and a few of the outlets aren’t even usable because when you try to plug something in, the bulb explodes. The heat doesn’t work, we put it on 85 degrees and the highest it will get when it’s 14 degrees outside is 69 degrees inside. The heater in the garage is not sealed which is probably where the air is leaking out. We’ve had the hot water heater replaced twice. The master suite stays frozen when it’s cold more than any other part of the house and usually it is more warm outside on a cold day than inside leading me to believe that room in particular has no insulation at all. There are also intercoms, and strange buzzing sounds will randomly start coming from them and you can’t stop them no matter what button you push. They’ll also turn on and off by themselves and many times we’ve found that the outside intercom would be on so people outside could hear what’s happening in the house. Also the dimming lights will suddenly come on leading me to believe our lights are somehow hooked up with a neighbors. Our water and electricity bill has had months of enormous expense, once $700, which caused the electric company to come to our house and ask us what we did to make the bill go so high when we had done nothing different. They read the meter and said it was accurate. Our phones also crackle when someone will pick up in another room and we’ve replaced the phones with new ones because the man Mattamy sent assured us that would “fix it.” There is currently a large crack that has appeared in the stucco of our house and as wet as Florida is, will probably rot the frame of the house if unfixed. The faucets leak constantly, and we didn’t have hot water either for a few days when we first moved in. The paint is horrible, some places of the house you can see under the windowsills where it wasn’t painted at all. Our lawn service man rang our doorbell and asked us to come look at our front porch this week because when he walked on it, it flexed up and down like there was nothing underneath it. Our driveway is beginning to crack as have many other driveways in our subdivision that have had to be replaced. What has happened so far to us, and as I’ve read in other complaint stories around the Internet, Mattamy only sends people contracted with their company to fix complaints. We’ve had all their people and they always claim nothing is wrong with the house. When we first moved in we told Mattamy what things needed to be fixed and they either fixed it after constant phonecalls reminding them to come do it, or it was left unfixed completely. If that list of problems isn’t exhaustive enough to convince someone not to buy a Mattamy home, I don’t know what is. Our built in, over the stove microwave light is blinking and it will probably go out soon, and the wood paneling that covers the wiring for the range cooktop randomly fell off and we have not been able to keep it up since. With the heat problem, we’ve seen other houses in the neighborhood having all the vents ripped out and thrown on their lawn because they had to get bigger vents. The heater was working badly when we first moved in, so we checked the air filter and Mattamy put in a filter that was too big for the slot and it was crushed up preventing air from circulating through it, so we had to replace that. Dust collects every couple of days because the air circulation is so poor. A weird thing about the heater is we found that if we aimed a space heater at the wall where the thermostat control was, it would raise the temperature it was heating the house. Today I pulled my car in the garage and as soon as I turned my motor off, I heard a bang on the hood and when I got out and looked, a bolt had fallen from the fixture holding up the garage door. All I ask is that if anyone else in the states or Canada is having similar problems, please speak up and make someone pay attention to the monopoly Mattamy has on building poorly built, high priced homes. It’s sad because one of the high-ups in Mattamy has recently been appointed District Manager of Construction in our area, and with all the positive media hype about how wonderfully built Mattamy homes are, on the Internet, nothing will be done to resolve this problem unless more people speak up.

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