Tyler Burraston

Review of McArthur Homes

tl;dr Two stars because we're happy to finally be ...

tl;dr Two stars because we're happy to finally be in our home and (hopefully) past dealing with McArthur; also the sales agent in our area was pleasant to work with. The negatives outweigh the positives, though, and I did not enjoy lining their pockets in gold. My advice: seriously look at other builders before deciding on McArthur.

McArthur would like you to believe there is something special about them and their homes; there isn't. The experience was worse than building with Holmes Homes (which should be telling considering the recent publicity Holmes has had). Why?

1. They were over a month late on the completion date. Okay, things happen; we understand. But once they knew the completion date was going to be missed, getting a new completion date was impossible, and the next dates given were missed also. This makes it incredibly difficult to plan around getting time off of work, oh, and the rate lock for your mortgage.

2. Our front yard has a severe slope, which we were (to a degree) aware we would need to deal with, fine. So, in an effort to work around this, we asked to keep some large boulders that were sitting on our lot. We were told that was not a problem, and that they would be sure to note that they were ours so others that were interested would not take them. With the understanding that we would have those, we made plans to use them in our landscaping to ease the slope in the front yard. We came to checkout the house a week or two later, and the boulders were gone. They'd been moved up the street and given to another customer, who happened to be a... squeaker wheel than us (there's a lesson in there somewhere). This is going to cost us a not-insignificant amount of money to have a landscaper acquire boulders and transport them to our lot.

3. We initiated the contract with their preferred lender (yes, not a direct McArthur employee, however, they are surely an agent for McArthur if we're being told, and are given perks, to use them) under the impression it would be beneficial for us. We shopped around and found the fees were higher with the preferred lender and decided to use a lender of our choice. We informed the preferred lender that we had chosen another company to work with and were immediately berated with messages from this agent. He was rude and very condescending, making sure (like in any bad break-up) to tell us we won't find anything like him and that we're making a huge mistake.

Need more reasons? Okay...

4. In their meetings, they like to spotlight hard/difficult conversations that their agents dealt with the past week... Well, my wife and I asked about the premium for the lot we wanted because it was higher than the rest that were available on the street. We were hoping to bring this in line with the rest since the lot wasn't all that much larger (at least, it didn't seem enough to justify the additional cost). Of course, being powerless in this situation, nothing happened. Found out this conversation was highlighted in their meeting (we're young-ish and naive, I promise this wasn't a difficult conversation). But we also asked about the estimated cost for lots behind ours (which are nearly double in size). We were told they estimate selling them for around a $40k-$60k premium. Okay, well, those were definitely out of the question. We moved forward with the lot we now have. Come to find out those lots are now selling for $5k-$6k premium. I won't say what we paid for ours, but it was significantly more. A drop from 40k-60k to 5k-6k cannot be attributed to a market fluctuation at this point in time. This is simply a case of us being worth more to them now than in the future. I think I have a sign on my back that says 'CHUMP', but I haven't found it yet.

I have more to say, but have run out of characters. Oh well.