Please, I beg you. Read this review in its entirety if you are considering Firstline Restoration. I'm not a litigious or vindictive person. I've battled with leaving this review for months, but it needs to be clear: nobody should hire this company, for anything. Everything I'm about to disclose is true. My family and I lost our house to a devastating fire while we were out of town. We lost nearly everything, including our two beloved dogs. Thankfully our house-sitter was out at the time. We had to start the painful process of dealing with the aftermath. The insurance company recommended Firstline as they were in their preferred network to do the cleanup and remediation. We hired them. We met Melissa at the site, and she actually cried seeing my makeshift crosses I made for our dogs. They did a great job cleaning up the property. Melissa and I built a good relationship. She was attentive, empathetic, and worked with us. The property got cleaned up and ready to rebuild. We were excited. My kids couldn't wait to be back in our house. The insurance paid for us to rent a house in the neighborhood while the house was rebuilt. It was perfect. I am in the industry, so I reached out to GC's that I knew to quote the rebuild. I got seven, including Firstline. They came in the middle, and with insurance money it wasn't going to be enough to rebuild. They worked with us and cut their quote down. We agreed to hire them. Their contract required a $224k deposit, which we paid. We were under contract to rebuild. Very excited. Then we ran into permitting issues. The local municipality (Palmetto Bay) was requiring us to raise the entire house, at our expense, by 9 inches to meet the existing FEMA flood map. It would have cost us another $150,000 out of pocket. I found out that there was a preliminary map that has the house in flood zone x, no flood zone. It had not been implemented yet because of two municipalities appealing it, which had no bearing on our property. Melissa was great. She got on calls with the municipality to attest that they could make an exception in our case, given the situation. The permitting department was relentless. My wife started looking at other properties. She found one. Not far from our house. We wanted to make an offer, but we needed to know how much we could get back from our deposit, given no work had been done. We called Melissa after looking at the property, and she said she would give us that number, but we should stay the course. They were ready to start rebuilding upon issuance of the permits. We agreed that we should stay the course and rebuild with Firstline. We fought the permitting department, and I finally found the FEMA guidelines to municipalities on when to grant an exception to the flood map. We fit all criteria. We went in front of city council to plead our case, and won unanimously. We finally were granted permits to rebuild. Meantime, Firstline put a port-o-potty on the site. The insurance company put a fence around the property. Now, we are in a bad situation. We have 3 months left in insurance paying for our rental after 5 months of delays. My wife wants to find another house. We can't afford to pay $9,000 a month for rent plus the $2800 mortgage we have been paying for the property. It was apparent that we had to sell the property, cut our losses, and move on. What did we get from Firstline? A new contract that required us to pay more for tariffs on wood from Canada (which was free from tariffs), and more money for a change order. We didn't sign it. We reached out to Melissa. Told her the situation. Explained that there was no way for them to rebuild the property in 3 months before we ran into a bad financial situation. We have to buy another home. She told me she would get me how much we would get back, but it wouldn't be much, if anything. They had put off other projects (which I understand). At this point, they had $224k of our money. Then, weeks passed without knowing how much we would get back. Now, we needed to recoup as much of that money as we could. The insurance company reached out to find out how the rebuild was going. We told them of the situation with Firstline. Come to find out, they wanted to go after Firstline but they were no longer on their preferred list of vendors. They were kicked off. We were powerless. In order to buy another property, we had to sell the shell of the house and the land. In order to do that, we needed a release of lien from Firstline. They were uncooperative, and then told us we were contractually obligated to pay them another $60,000 because permits had been issued. We found another home. Had to pay the top of the market. Had to pay Firstline another $60k. We thought we were done with them, after paying nearly $300k for nothing. Couldn't even let us send a courier to pick up a document we needed to close on our new house. Intentionally screwed us. They intentionally made our situation worse. read more