Drees Custom Homes at Harper's Preserve

"Very dishonest people"

"My family and I are in the market for a home. Visited with them, and two other builders 2 weeks ago, followed up with them on a Thursday and set a time for Sunday to meet to sign the contract. Needless to say there was much excitement over what was going to be our future home. Between Thursday and Sunday, I did much research on the company, read countless reviews and spoke to people with direct knowledge of the company. Understanding most people only take time to offer bad reviews, we were not dissuaded and took the reviews at face value. So we stopped by on Sunday and about 5 minutes in as we were completing the contract, the representative shared "Oh, I am so sorry, our pricing changed on Friday. Your model is now higher." Oddly, that statement harkened me back to a common thread in many of the negative reviews where pricing tends to shift with them. We explained we were there on Thursday and agreed to come in on Sunday to sign the contract. The time line largely due to the representative going out of town on Friday. To hear now suddenly pricing was changing was distressing, what was more distressing was the representative seemed unwilling to discuss this scenario with someone above who would agree to honor pricing from a couple days earlier. We were led to believe because it was a Sunday, it was difficult to get someone who could approve. That seemed odd to me given the business they are in, and also how the representative was empowered to negotiate the cost for a premium lot (which also changed from Thursday to Sunday). All of this gave me pause, but we moved on given the increase was a small amount in the grand scheme. As we moved on, we encountered yet another area of concern. This one around a clause in their contract which seemed to be very one sided to protect the builder due to a rise in costs associated with building supplies. It was not lost on me given the current environment this is a challenge, but the way the clause was worded was rather open ended and largely there to protect the builders interests even though it was suggested it was there to protect the buyer too. I sought for deeper clarity on the impact we might see from a cost perspective and the representative was vague in responding. I pressed to see if they would offer discounts if the cost of supplies were to go lower than what they are under current conditions. It was clear they would not. At this point, things got a little weird. The representative became emotional, and apologized for the outburst, attributing it to feeling intimidated by my line of questions. I responded to say, please forgive me but we're spending a lot of money here, we are going to have more questions, and they may be equally challenging for you. At this point, in an effort to reduce stress on both sides, I walked away to let my wife work through it. We left an hour later without a signed contract and a few days later there were no responses to what if anything Drees would do to address our concerns. After 2 days, we moved on from them. I think they would build a really great home, but it would be a long and likely challenging process with them given what we were seeing in the contract signing phase. Most of the common threads I took away from prior reviews came out loud and clear during our meeting."

"Drees team is great, from marketing manager, builder to warrant assistant manager. The houses they built are the best."