Tranquility Development Group

MULTIPLE LEAKS — DID NOT HONOR WARRANTY Tranquility markets its homes through Urban Living and seems to be quite active inside the loop. Their website includes a pleasant introduction extolling their many commendable virtues, their calling to fulfill their homeowner’s desires for the perfect home, and the requisite testimonials from happy homeowners. To be fair, we are very happy with the floor plan and the location of the home, and communicated as much to the builder. As for the quality of the finished product and level of customer service after the sale, well…
We were skeptical at first but Mark (the patriarch of the business) reassured us that there «is no such thing as a perfect house» and sure enough he was right. When our inspector detected an elevated moisture reading in the living room wall, rather than working to reassure us Mark berated us for «hiring a 27 year old inspector» and proceeded get all emotional about how much he had slaved over our house and sweated every detail and here we were not sufficiently appreciative. How dare we! The truth was we’d never met him nor seen him at the job site until a week or so before closing when they were rushing to finish (with what looked like a crew of homeless guys), this despite making multiple visits several times a month at varying times during the six month construction process. His last minute theatrics came across as quite well rehearsed but what would’ve have gone a long way with us was a simple acknowledgment that moisture meters don’t lie and a sincere offer to work with us to address the issue. Instead we got indignation and builder bullshit. He did excuse himself after delivering his impromptu lecture and his son Blake allowed our inspector to investigate further. A few squirts of Bondo later, problem solved! These guys are big fans of caulk. Since we’ve been in the home, most of the multiple leaks around the house did get addressed promptly, at least at first, and some of their repairs have actually held up (The Tranquility crews exhibited a remarkably consistent quality of craftsmanship; we’ve had leaks on every floor of a 4 story home!). Their crew also managed to show up about two weeks after closing to tie in the roof gutter that had been left unfinished and gushing storm water onto our neighbor’s roof some 40 feet below. The really crappy parts of the interior paint job were also addressed and we’ve learned to live with the less crappy parts; kind of grows on you after a while in an odd sort of way and gives the place a little character. Same thing with our crooked privacy fence. Every time we see it coming in the door we marvel in amazement at the effort it must’ve taken for their fence subcontractor to screw that up. String is a handy invention, particularly useful when marking and following a straight line. Must’ve been a string shortage when they were finishing our job. Sadly, their zeal for responding to our warranty requests seriously waned after about the 9 month mark. A few more issues popped up (including yes, more leaks, even some they purported to have fixed earlier!) before the expiry of the warranty period but our repeated requests for repairs while supposedly still under warranty went unanswered. We even sent them an inspection report commissioned at our expense following a weekend of heavy rains identifying multiple deficiencies in an effort to assist them in scheduling repairs. Still nothing fixed or even scheduled. The last straw though was their refusal to accept a registered letter listing the open warranty items per the warranty agreement– I guess they figure if they ignore us we’ll go away. Or maybe they were just tired. We’ve never had as many warranty issues with a house as we’ve had with this one, and if our experience is typical of their buyers, they’ve got their hands full. UPDATE 11÷13÷15: We contacted the warranty servicing company who contacted the builder. The servicing company representative stated that she was advised by Tranquility that the were running behind because the had seven (7) other houses with similar issues as ours, but that they would get to us as soon as they could. So we shall see. Stay tuned…