Facundo Home Builders

We contracted with Miguel Facundo (Facundo Home Builder) and it was one of the best decisions we ever made. Miguel worked with us through the design stage all the way through selecting plumbing and light fixtures. He is very knowledge able as well as a master decorator. Miguel helped us by giving us great ideas as well as helping us select fixtures that truly made our home a reflection of our family. Our new home is structurally sound and extremely well built - no corners were cut at any phase of the building process. We would recommend Miguel Facundo / Facundo Home Builder to anyone.

We signed a contract and paid a deposit toFacundo Home Builders in April of 2012. We chose this home builder because he had built many homes in the area including someone in our own family. We knew the quality of his work and even though we were aware of Facundo's arrogant attitude we chose him because of his end product. In our contract we thought our home would be finished in or around April 2013. At first things went well. Aside from Facundo's constant tardiness whenever we had an appointment. At one time he left us at a restaurant for over an hour waiting on him. Always telling us how busy he was. Never realizing that our time was just as valuable as his. We looked at floor plans,exterior elevations and spent time choosing the look of our home. Facundo was generally late in getting plans to us but at this point we weren't concerned. It wasn't until Sept/Oct that we began to get concerned when NOTHING had happened on our lot. We would ask Facundo and he would always say that things were tied up with the city. He stated that the City had to have the land re-platted and that this was the delay. We then began to call the City ourselves. We were able to find out that even the parts of the process that he said had been cleared in fact had not. We questioned him about this and he would then say that they were just minor details and that it was just the re-platt we were waiting on. He finally broke ground at the end of January 2013, and in turn sent us a bill for the re-platt. At no point in the process had he ever come to us and told us that this was an expense of ours. The contract that we signed even stated that all City of Houston fees where to be paid by him. We questioned him on this and contacted our attorney. We were advised that we were not to pay the re-platt because Facundo should have to have gotten us to sign a change order to do this and he had not done so. Facundo's then tried to pay us a fraction of our deposit to get rid of us. We did not agree with this. This went back and forth for a while and he then refunded all of our money plus $100. Per his contract if he felt the relationship became too strained then he could refund our money plus $100 and walk away which is what he chose to do. The bottom line is that Facundo did not do his homework on this lot. It was a different shaped lot but he assured us that our home would fit. And when he ran into a problem he wanted us to take responsibility for it, instead of admitting that he had messed up. The most frustrating part was the constant lack of professionalism and communication on his part. When he knew he was in the wrong it would then sometimes take him a week to answer calls, emails, texts. If he had been honest in communicating this to us, we have no doubt that the end result would have been much different. We would not recommend Facundo Home Builders to anyone. He tries to sell you the world before he has your money then once he does he is hard to communicate with and wants to be in charge of building you the home he wants you to have. We are now back at square one trying to find a lot to build on. We do have a new builder and the experience up to this point is night and day different. In the end we are glad the relationship with Facundo ended because we now feel that we are apart of the process of building our future home.

We bought a house in Garden Oaks with the understanding that we would need to do some remodeling. As we were getting prepared to start Phase I of the re-model we started looking for builders in the neighborhood because we thought that since they were familiar with the neighborhood, they would be able to work well with the home owners association. We saw a Facundo sign down the street and throughout other parts of the neighborhood, and decided to speak with him about remodeling our house. He was very agreeable when we were meeting to discuss plans and how we wanted to move forward with the remodel. He helped us to develop a plan and we thought that we had a good process going forward. He took us to other houses that he was building in the neighborhood so we could see his work and we decided to use him for our project. WHAT A MISTAKE!!!!! We made it very clear to Facundo that the previous owner had done a lot of the work on the house themselves, and that he would find a lot of items that would need to be dealt with. He said that was fine and that the amount in the quote would not be increased based on findings. On the very first day, beginning of January, Facundo put a stack of dry wall in our backyard, this will be significant later on. Around the February timeframe, he finished with the tear out, and this is where we started having issues. We have dogs, and specifically told Facundo that if he needed to be in the back yard that he should just let us know and we would put them in their crates for that day. This meant that he actually had have to have a plan each week of what work was going to be done. We found that he would not tell us what work was going to be done and discovered that each day when they needed to be in the back yard, they would whistle and taunt the dogs to try to keep them inside. We started having issues with our dogs fighting because of being taunted all day by the workers in the house. The response from Facundo was that the room was more important than the dogs and he would do what he wanted to do. As we went along through the remodel, Facundo found shortcuts to try to reduce his costs because he under-quoted the project. He ran new plumbing on the outside of the wall and was going to frame it up so you would not see it. He did not ask us if that is what we wanted and when confronted about it, said that it was just rough-in for inspection. After asking about the plumbing 3 or 4 additional times, he finally admitted that he intended to leave it where it was and that he knew best what we wanted. We made him run it back through the wall like it should have been all along. In doing this, he wanted to charge us additional money for placing the plumbing correctly. We started paying closer attention to what he was doing in the house, and discovered that he did not like this at all. We had a meeting with him and told him that we did not think that we were partnering on the project. He said that we were right, this was not a partnership, we hired him to do the work and he knew what was best and that we needed to let him do his work. We had asked him to create a new shower space for us and he roughed in the plumbing prior to finalizing the estimate for the shower space. Once we started having issues with him, we did not want to add any additional work and told him to just finish what he started. When he found out that he would not be doing the additional shower area, he ripped out all of the plumbing that he had put in place. This was basically to keep us from having anyone else come in and add the shower later. Once we saw that this happened, we went in one weekend ourselves and re-installed the plumbing. We emailed Facundo and told him that in no way should he touch the plumbing that we had put back in place. He called my husband and told him that he was in big trouble and he was sending someone over to the house as they were speaking to rip out the plumbing. My husband and I left work to go to the house and asked the Facundo contractor to leave the premises. We then went to Home Depot to buy a new lock for the front door so we could keep Facundo out of the house. As we were changing the lock, the Facundo representative and the plumber had pulled up and were standing in our front yard. Finally Facundo showed up and came up to the door. He told us again that we were in big trouble and brought the portion of the contract where is said we could not get our own sub-contractors and that if we did get our own sub-contractors, that he would not warranty the work. No where in the contract does it say that if we have our own sub-contractor come in that the remedy is for him to rip out the work that was done. We told him that he could not come into our house until we had this resolved. He told us that he could do whatever he wanted and that if we wanted him off our property that we had to call the police. I went to grab the phone to call the police and he finally left. By this time we are into the April timeframe, still do not have walls up or much of anything done on the house. And yes, the dry wall had been in the backyard for 4 months. He was still planning on using it for the house. We have not and will never let this man in our house again. He wanted to control the entire project and did not want us to give our input even though it was our house. I believe the only reason that we were able to keep tabs on him regularly was because we were living in the house during the remodel. He cut corners where he could and did very bad work. One of the main things that we asked him to do was to level the floor. It was not level when the subfloor was installed. We asked him to fix it and he was going to charge us for it. Please stay away from this guy.

DISASTER!! We lived close to the neighborhood we wanted to build. We started looking for builders and lots in Garden Oaks in the Spring of 2009. His sign was on quite a few new homes in that area at the time and he lives in that area. We approached him to discuss building a home. He was very attentive during this process and really bent over backwards to help us find a lot. He seemed to know the neighbors and who was selling and could make deals directly with the home owners planning to sell. He showed us lot after lot, but we had to agree to use him to build. We were unsure about this process as we wanted to wait until we had the house designed and then put it out for bid, but the architect couldn't design the house until he knew the shape/size of the lot, which we hadn't found yet. It was a "chicken or the egg" situation. We couldn't talk to anyone he built with from the beginning only those who had purchased spec homes from him and they said he was fine. As he continued to show us properties we liked, but could not buy without using him, we determined it would be crazy for him to mess with us since he lived in the neighborhood and Garden Oaks was really taking off with tear downs, so he would ruin his business with a bad customer experience. We decided to go with him. WHAT A MISTAKE. Once he had our name on the paper, everything changed. He bought the lot and carried the construction loan. At first we thought this was a nice gesture, then we came to realize he did this to control the situation. He fenced in the property and would not allow us access. We poured our foundation in January and closed in Nov. We were in the house less than 15 times during the build. We began to hear stories that he didn't like people questioning his methods so he just kept them off the property. His guys would actually confront us and physically prevent us from going on the property and then call him if we ever showed up. It became clear very quickly he was in over his head with the house. He clearly underbid it and started charging us extra for everything trying to make up. We asked him repeatedly to sit with us and the architect to work our issues so we could keep the price under control. He refused, nor did he make any attempt to work with us on things. The final price was well over the plan and we've had to pay tens of thousands to finish things he wouldn't (like hang light fixtures!!) and correct mistakes. We're still paying contractors to clean up his mess and finish things and he's refusing to honor warranty. Things got so bad toward the end we had to engage attorneys to get out. Dealing with him was like dealing with a tired and hungry 3 year old. He would blow up over things and would never sit down to work things out with us. He's a control freak and only interested in himself. He just wants everyone to stay out of his way and cut him checks. We only continued with him to avoid losing a substantial downpayment and a nice lot, but in the end, that would have been a less costly approach. We had two friends building at the same time as us. Both had "normal" building experiences. The occasional problem or price disagreement, but their builders worked with them to make things fair. They were allowed to go into their homes as often as they wanted and whenever they wanted - without being escorted by their builder. As they noticed problems or things they were expecting, they were able to work it out then. Our whole experience was one big nightmare. STAY AWAY FROM THIS GUY!