We had a horrible experience trying to buy a house from these people…read more
Our first try at making them an offer, at the suggestion of our Kiawah River realtor Gaby, ended in early spring 2020 with an incomplete answer, no counter, and no interest from them in responding like any normal company would. You do business their way, or not at all.
By July, we had sold our Beaufort, SC house and the real estate world was getting crazy. Inventory was scarce to nonexistent. We had gotten a nice rental and had some time. So we gave Kiawah River another try. They had land and to be built new houses. (Lucky timing beats being good any time.). We had our mortgage approved and got a contract from there on a new house from Saussy Burbank. Let the fun begin...(or so we thought..)
First came the design selections. Most things were quite ancient. People and product. Even the upgrades weren't much improved over the standard stuff. This part is quite infamous at Kiawah River. Ask anybody. Enough said.
We went through the construction process with patience, calmness, and leniency, no matter how inept it was at times (a house full of the wrong cabinets, two rooms with ridiculously un-level floors, wrong color doors and shutters, mangled trim, one tile floor had to be redone three times, etc.). (Our almost next door neighbors had raw sewage issues their first six weeks, so at least we weren't in that stinky boat!). (One of the un-level floors was patched with something that looked like chewing gum...'hope nobody slides downstairs in a wad of Juicy Fruit after a hot shower..) The construction head was a nice kid and tried hard to please, but we guessed that he was just spread so thin that he wasn't there very much..
As we neared completion, Dec. 18 was the closing date. Fine with us. We were even ok to close without the house not being totally finished. We had movers lined up, a refrigerator and mattress on the way, a loaded trailer, family on the way to the new house. But our mortgage company- Guild (a good friend's son in law worked there), TOTALLY dropped the ball. They had made the previous three weeks a constant nightmare with request after request and basically shut down my wife's business. Then they missed the first close. (We were at the lawyers office.). And the second. They finally said they had the third, skipping to tell us we needed an extra 63,000 to close. That was the final straw and we dismissed them. Our Kiawah River agent suggested CBC Mortgage- John Parnell, and he was fantastic. He did more in four hours than Guild did in four months, even offering 100,000 more than Guild. He did need a few weeks extra to close. And thats when the you know what hit the fan.
The builder's local boss, Al McNeill, went berserk over the delay. We had asked if he was ok with the other delays, and he was. But not this one. This boss is a preachy, pompous, whiny really inconsiderate man. He is as flexible as the China Great Wall and had zero compassion for us. He should not be dealing with the public with his attitude. On December 23, he called the Kiawah River Director Carter Redd and complained. Redd, instead of calming down this builder and telling him we had extenuating circumstances galore, opted to blast us too. We were trying to get a commercial bridge loan to help close, but the bank we had a relationship with had no bankers working then (Christmas, Corona). I had also ordered up a loan against an insurance policy, but it didn't get here in time. I needed both. So now, after fighting builder and developer all by ourselves, our only options were to pay a 5600 penalty (yes, per contract, all 70 pages of it) or walk. We though we never did anything wrong and had acted in good faith the whole time, so we had had enough and walked. Doing business with this outfit is not a nice two way street; it is a one way tunnel.
So, at least understand what kind of people these are. If it could happen to us, it could happen to you, or your kids, or parents. Beware.
