Hollen Landscaping

We contacted Mr. Hollen in June of 2011 for an estimate, he came out and made a bunch of promises: promised to complete the work in a week, promised to have his whole crew work on the project, promised to do the best job, promised to start on a certain date, etc.He originally wanted all material costs down and half labor costs. We negotiated to all materials only. He gave us alot of run arounds and took our money and barely did any work. He was difficult to communicate with, lost his temper many times and was very unprofessional. He would say that he would show up and then not, and will give you every excuse under the sun. If you bring it to his attention, you are the one who is difficult to deal with. He took his time and did not care about completing our project in a timely manner. His "whole crew" consists of him and one other worker. Our surveillance cameras showed a lack of work when they were on the job site, I personally stayed home one day to observe behind closed doors and saw him and his worker laying down on the job for a significant amount of time. He charges by the hour (per the contract) and will milk it for all he can get. He then called us one Friday to tell us that he had unauthorized charges on his bank account and asked for payroll/labor money. We refused (as we had given a hefty deposit and 6 weeks later not even half the job was complete) now he wanted even more money. When we refused to give him more money, he got very upset, threatened to walk of the project, and then refused to do a portion of the estimate. He made it very difficult to work with him. We gave him a design of what we wanted, and plenty of details. He forgot alot of it, didn't pay attention or didn't care. We had to correct alot of the things he was doing wrong, and again, we were the ones being difficult. Long story short, he did not complete the project, kept our deposit and had the audacity to say that we owed him even more money. BEWARE OF THE CONTRACT. We should have had a lawyer review the contract prior to signing it. We didn't know at the time of signing the contract, but his grandfather is a lawyer and created the contract for him. It is biased in favor of Mr. Hollen. READ EVERY DETAIL. Make sure the contract has a start date and an estimated completion date. Make sure that you are not charged per hour, only charged per the estimate hours. Better yet, don't do business with Mr. Hollen. You will regret it.Mr. Hollen is not licensed to do concrete work, he will tell you that he doesn't need one. He is also not licensed to do sprinkler systems and he may tell you that he is operating under someone elses license, but do your research first, you do need a license to perform concrete work in New Mexico.We had to take Mr. Hollen to small claims court and we received a judgement in our favor for the balance of money that he owed us for not completing the project.