I strongly recommend doing your research before hiring Bayscape. I wish I had looked at their…read morepublic court records before signing a contract, as doing so would have raised some serious red flags.
We originally hired Bayscape because we were looking for a landscape maintenance company that understood our property and communicated reliably. During the initial sales process, they sounded knowledgeable and professional. Unfortunately, our experience after hiring them was very different.
The biggest problems started with a relatively small landscaping project to remove several dead/dying plants and replace them with new ones. What should have been a straightforward project turned into months of delays and repeated mistakes.
Our property manager, Kory, initially met with us, discussed what we wanted, and promised to provide a plant list and rendering for our approval. It took considerable follow-up to get the plant list and schedule the work, and we never received the promised rendering. We ultimately had to involve his managers to get the project scheduled.
Kory then repeatedly rescheduled the work. We had arranged for a brief meeting before the new plants were installed, but he canceled multiple times. When the work finally took place, I had told Kory that I would be gone but that my husband would be home all day. Kory said he would either speak with my husband or send me photos, but he didn't contact either of us all day.
When I arrived home, I discovered that the area we had discussed had not been planted. Instead, his team had removed plants from a completely different area that we had never asked them to touch and planted the new plants there. Kory initially insisted that this was correct, but eventually agreed to bring out additional plants for the original area.
One of those plants turned orange and died within a week. Another was never actually planted--it was simply placed in a hole in the ground. Kory said he would correct both issues, but never did. At one point, he told us, "I can't control what my team does." This enforced that he had no oversight over the property.
The irrigation problems that followed were even more concerning. We repeatedly found broken irrigation lines spraying water like small geysers. Each time Bayscape came out to repair an issue, we would discover another problem shortly afterward.
Our irrigation was also running at 4 p.m., so we asked Bayscape why. Kory said he couldn't determine the reason. He later told us Bayscape had been receiving frequent callbacks because of problems with their irrigation manager, who had been fired and replaced. The new irrigation manager came out and told us the system had been fixed.
The following week, we had another landscaping company inspect the system. They found 10 additional leaks, some of which they described as significant. They also discovered that our irrigation had been programmed to run twice, which explained the 4 p.m. watering.
The financial impact was significant. Our next two-month water bill was approximately $1,000 higher than normal, with usage averaging around 1,300 gallons per day. We also incurred additional expenses since we had to hire the other company to repair the leaks and cuts to the irrigation system.
We brought the entire situation to Bayscape management, Tom and Matt Ellington, including the delays, unauthorized removal of plants, incorrect planting, dead plants, ongoing irrigation problems, and resulting water bill. Their proposed solution was to come back out and try to fix the problems and waive our final week of maintenance.
After everything we had experienced, that was not an acceptable resolution. We had already spent more than a month having Bayscape address irrigation problems, only to continue finding additional issues. Waiving one week of maintenance did not address the approximately $1,000 increase in our water bill, the plants that needed to be replaced, or the considerable time and effort we had spent trying to get these problems resolved and we certainly didn't trust them to come back to our property.
What started as a small landscaping project became months of delays, incorrect work, repeated irrigation problems, and significant additional expense. Based on our experience, I would not hire Bayscape again and would strongly recommend doing thorough research before hiring them.
