ALLIANCE HOMES

My wife and I built a new home with Alliance Homes. The process was extremely enjoyable. The entire team at Alliance was very helpful in every aspect of the project. The finished product was just what we had imagined, they really made our dream come true. With so many builders to choose from, we are so happy we decided to use Alliance. Thier attention to the details shows in the final product. I would highly recommend you give them a look if you are thinking of a custom new built home.

Alliance Homes was hired in July 2011 with the finish date to be approximately 2 weeks. The job wasn't completed until December 2011. The sub contractor for the counter tops (Shell Fab) had to install the counter top twice because of improper measurement and sink not centered in the opening. The tile company that installed the backsplash had to do it twice (rip out the newly installed tile because of improper installation). The cabinets were purchased from Aliance's sub contractor (Kitchen Advantage). Kitchen Advantage had a cabinet maker make a replacement cabinet for us and charged an extremely out-of-line price for a two door upper kitchen cabinet ($1300.00). We paid the price because we needed to get the job done. The electricians failed to install a cover plate on one of the junction boxes for the new wiring.The new entrance door was supposed to be fiberglass - it is steel. The calking on the exterior new window installation turned orange. One of the sliding shelves in the pantry fell out (bent slider). Overall, a lot of headaches and bad feelings.

The work was done well, but not in a timely fashion. They said that it would take 2 weeks, it took 6 months. Oddly enough, they are a well-known company in this area. I don’t know what happened, they just dropped the ball. I wrote a letter to the company president when the job was done. He called me and made apologies, but that was pretty much it. I was happy with the work, but I wasn't happy with timeline. If I had known better, there would have been a stipulation about a completion date in the contract we signed. I would not use them again in the future.

The rep from Alliance initially came out, and I was very pleased with his professionalism, communication, and apparent knowledge of the project that I was requesting an estimate on. He came back with an estimate that was out of my budget (it took more than a week when I was told "in a few days"), so I asked for another option that would get me within my budget. This time it was closer to 2 weeks that it took him to get back to me. He left a message and I returned it the same day. I haven't heard back from him since (My initial appointment was at the end of February). If I had to guess, he wasn't interested in doing such a small project (I wanted to stay at $15,000), but that is pure speculation. It was disappointing, as Alliance had been recommended by a friend. Additionally, if he didn't want to take on my project for whatever reason, I would have respected that had he told me.

The experience was great. Everyone we worked with from the owner to the carpenters, plumbers, drywall, insulation, and painters were professional and timely. I hope to be able to have Alliance do more work for me in the future.

We love our new home. We first met Andy the builder at a local home show. He was the only builder that was actually at the model homes during the show, and he took quite a bit of time to speak with us. This impressed us. Then we got a call the next day from Audrey who set up an appointment to look at house options. She was able to get an initial design suggestion back to us pretty quickly (we were living in Virginia at the time and needed to get home). We also met with three other builders but chose Alliance based on several factors, including the design and costing and the fact that Andy worked so hard with us looking at property and eventually found the lot we wanted for us. The only real problems we ran into with the project stemmed from our being out of town and having to make some decisions with only a little notice. Also we were novices at building a home and we had a learning curve in figuring out what we needed to do during the building process and what we could have waited to decide on until after the home was built. For example, we got a nice price from Alliance on a patio and we expected not to have to have it poured until June but then got a call (in April I think) that they wanted to do it that week. We had not researched whether we wanted stamped concrete or some other option, and we realize now we should have just waited and possibly done the patio on our own later when we had time to consider our choices. We could have done this, just didn't think. We would likely have gotten a larger one and used paving stones rather than concrete. Another example was one time when we came up to Buffalo specifically to make some decisions (wall vac, alarm system, etc.) , we were then told that we needed to decide on wiring for cable tv, phone, computer, speakers, etc. immediately (like in the next 1-2 days as dry wall was about to be erected). This was a a surprise, we had no advance notice of this and so had not researched anything and were making important and expensive decisions without enough information. Things with this have worked out pretty well, we did decide not to have some of the work recommended by the electronics firm Alliance worked with, and we may end up replacing the ceiling speakers they did for us. There were only a couple of times we were not happy with the suppliers Alliance worked with and this was one of them. Alliance had a nice range of options to choose from in selecting cabinets, paint, other features, and their selection allowances were pretty good. We did go above on a number of things. Most of the "extra" costs however were in upgrades to the home itself (a full-house generator, furnace upgrades, and such like). One areas where we spent quite a bit over the allowance was in plumbing. As we were out of town, we felt we needed to deal with the plumbing supply house Alliance worked with. They charged us full retail price (Alliance did give us a small discount when we indicated we had not expected to pay full retail) when we could have gotten the same exact products much cheaper through Lowes, Home Depot or the internet. However, since we could not be available to take care of any problems (wrong item delivered, missing parts, defective items replaced, etc.), we felt we had better go with the supplier Alliance could deal with directly to resolve issues. This was another instance of our being out of town making things a little more difficult. In comparing costs with the other builders we talked with and adjusting for variations in alllowances, differences in standard features, etc., we found the per square foot prices among two of them to be very close. We love our house. We appreciate all the help from everyone at Alliance. We are confident that they will be available to us if any problems arise in the future and in fact there are still a few things they will take care of for us when we make a decision about where to put some connections, etc. Andy, Amber, Audrey and the others had lots of great ideas and were extremely helpful to us throughout the entire process. We haven't found anyone who has had a bad word to say about Alliance.