CalAtlantic Homes review: questionable ethics

My family and I were extremely excited to be building our first home. We had found the ‘perfect’ home in the new community of Phillips Creek, Frisco, Texas, and were excited to begin the building process with Standard Pacific. This excitement quickly turned into stress with the forging of our initials, the delay in getting our earnest money back, to the basic unprofessionalism and lack of ethics within the company.

We signed our contract and had to continuously follow up to get a copy of the executed contract back. After three weeks, we got the executed contract back only to find that three pages and conditions had been amended and our initials forged. The most notable amendment was the date of completion was changed to reflect ‘TBD’.

We brought the amended contract issues up with the sales associate and sales manager where we requested a meeting with their area manager. We were shown a lot of resistance. “It is my hope we can come to terms amongst ourselves and continue forward with your new home. Involving higher levels of management could bring unknown and unpredictable responses” – quoted from email sent by the sales manager.

From discussions and email correspondence, the sales managers’ attitude was very much that ‘we were making a storm in a teacup’; that the contract was executed and we can proceed. As the sales manager put it, the sales associate was only trying to help and the three pages were not material to the contract. “After going through the 3 areas of the paperwork affected, I can see that she sincerely was only attempting to benefit you.” – quoted from email sent by the sales manager.

Despite the fact that we had to numerous times point out that our initials had been forged and that this made the contract void. “We do have an executed contract in the eyes of our company and we are moving forward with permits” – quoted from email sent by the sales manager.

We were also told that this was the first time that signatures had been forged. Again, it is hard to believe considering that our initials had been forged three times and it had been done so well that we had to look at the forged initials very carefully. The original without the signature was included and then the page with the forged signatures was shrunk. All too well thought out for a first attempt. The sad thing is we were asked to initial two amendments previously, which we turned around within hours.

Eventually we could meet with the area manager who brought the President for the DFW region into the meeting. We were informed that the relevant sales associate had been dismissed and that they considered the situation to be resolved. However, we still wanted to ascertain the company ethos and management’s view regarding this situation, as well as whether we would be comfortable moving forward with Standard Pacific. It become very clear early on in the meeting that management wanted us to walk away from the project. As we were politely told they can sell this home to other buyers and if we do build with them we would need to change our attitudes, despite the lose of trust we now had in the company building our home.

The building process is a long one, no matter who your builder is, and thus after this meeting we felt that there was unfortunately only one option we were comfortable with, and that was terminating the agreement.

We signed the cancellation agreement and the area manager informed us that we should receive our earnest money back after 10 business days. We were also told to liaise with the other sales manager at the Phillips Creek Office to get our money refunded (one would think that an issue like this management may get involved). After two weeks we followed up with the new sales manager only to be told it would take another 6-8 weeks to get our earnest money back. At this point, we sent a reply email back to the sales manager about this revised period of getting our funds returned. We copied in the area manager and president into the email, and we had no response from either. On our own accord we called the Corporate Accounts department at head office in California to arrange for the check to be sent to us. They were very helpful with regards to the returning of our earnest money and amazingly we had our check by the end of that week.

We believe that the biggest downfall of the DFW division is their ‘lack of management’. We can only imagine what a stressful process building with Standard Pacific would have been due to the lack of professionalism, lack of response, and above all the general attitude towards customers, which all seems to filter down from the top management.