Mere words cannot describe the fury and frustration we've experienced while Home River Group (previously Home Encounter) was our property management company. We should've done something about it long ago. But our account manager would change, things would improve for a short while (enough for us to be hopeful again), then it would all fall to pieces...again.
To put this in perspective, we finally decided it would be EASIER TO GO THROUGH THE PROCESS OF SELLING OUR HOME than to continue to work with them.
Call it complacency, ineptitude, and/or a sheer lack of effs given on Home River's behalf, but it all boils down to a complete breakdown of communication. I could fill encyclopedia volumes with emails I sent to try and send someone out to lower the blinds in our home so we were HOA-compliant. This process took almost 3 months. 3 MONTHS TO LOWER BLINDS! Trying to get a garbage disposal repaired and schedule a moveout cleaning? Quadruple the emails from the incident with the blinds. Then quadruple it again.
Throughout all of this, we paid a management fee AND a maintenance mark-up. Before you say "well, the markup covers the salaries of the people in the maintenance coordination department," keep in mind the ONLY reason we saw progress is because I got on the phone with the contractor and coordinated it myself.
Don't even get me started on the accounting department. They produce invoices and statements that even top-level managers at Home River have difficulty reading and explaining.
I'm not the type of person to take radio-silence or "no" as the final answer, so all of these issues have, at one point, been escalated up the chain to Brad Van Rooyen (the President and one of the founders of Home River Group) who then DE-ESCALATED the issues back to Managers whose hands were somewhat tied.
During our final push to finish the last of the repairs scheduled before our home changed hands, we learned second-hand that maintenance found us and our Realtor to be disagreeable and "a pain to work with." We found it interesting commentary from people who never set foot inside the property they were being paid to manage. We were seen as "disagreeable" because we did not approve a complete unit rehab. Even more interesting that this decision was based on the recommendation of TWO Home River property managers. The "pain to work with" comment was humorous. Once the repairs had supposedly been completed, our Realtor made her umpteenth visit to our property to check. She laid eyes on the property in person, flipped switches, and walked around: All things Home River should've done in the first place. Then she added repairs to the list of repairs that had never been done.
I believe this email we sent to Home River accurately depicts the struggles we've experienced: "148 emails have been shared between us and Home River in an attempt to have our home cleaned, repaired, and our account resolved. I counted. 149 if you include this one. This does not include emails between me, our Realtor, your handyman, and a different cleaning company we contracted ourselves because it wasn't getting done through Home River. With every day and every email that goes by, our frustration and fury grows. I would highly recommend you convey the following message to these people you're attempting to get answers from: Get yourselves together, pick up a phone, and dial my number. It's not difficult, but you've made it difficult. If there's one thing we've learned from this pandemic is zoom, conference calls, etc. are easier than ever before to arrange group communication. It's the least we could expect from a company we've paid thousands of dollars in management fees to over the years." And even after this email, the issue STILL wasn't resolved for another few weeks.
One of the reasons it wasn't resolved is because the items that were supposedly repaired weren't actually repaired. When you hire a property management company and their services include managing repairs, you trust that they vet the contractors hired to do work. I found out through my own research that the contractor they hired to do ALL the repairs is 1. Not a licensed contractor in the state of Florida, and 2. Hasn't been a recognized business in the state of Florida since September of 2016 due to failure to file an annual report. For reference, as I write this, it's May 2020. This "contractor" hasn't had a legal business in almost 4 years.
Again, there are numerous reasons our experience with Home River was absolutely nightmarish, but it all boils down to communication. Without proper communication, a company has nothing. And Home River just seems to be floundering haphazardly, barely keeping it together, and only operating because (so far) an employee has been unwilling to pull back the curtain and reveal the mess behind it. read more