Complaint Review: Del Webb & Pulte Homes - Cape Coral Florida

DO NOT BUY FROM PULTE THEY WILL CHANGE YOUR CONTRACT TERMS AND STEAL YOUR DEPOSIT. Apparently the economy has finally caught up with this company. I notice that the volume of complaints has escalated dramatically in late 2009 and early 2010. I am currently a Pulte home owner. I bought my present home in late 2006 after it was built for me by Pulte. I paid somewhere around $320,000 for this home which is in the Chicago area. Due the current real estate market Pulte has dropped prices to almost $200,000 for the exact same house because they have chosen to stop developing my community. This will cost me way more than just $100,000 when you factor in the interest on my current mortgage based on my purchase price of $320,000. This could very easily happen to you. Fortunately I was able to sustain this loss and I actually made the decision to buy a 2nd home in Florida in late 2009. I found a community in South Florida and Pulte happened to be one of the builders. I looked at their homes and was quite pleased. I decided to purchase 2 of these homes for just over $200,000 each. Over the next 6 months I had problem after problem with the Pulte Group. First they did not honor the terms that were agreed upon, in writing, within the contract. They promised a gated community but failed to disclose that the gates are kept WIDE OPEN for the majority of the day every day eliminating the entire purpose of living in a gated community. Secondly they misplaced the foundation of my home by over 8 feet. When I brought this to their attention they acted as if it happens every day to them! I work in real estate and construction so I suppose this should have been a big red flag but I was so busy with my own work I still continued with these purchases. They relocated my foundation but did so in such a quick time period that they failed to allow for proper settling, my own construction experts have confirmed that the land would need substantial time to re-settle after being disturbed in this manner. I inspected the property mid-way through construction and noticed cracking all over the concrete exterior walls of the homes and other signs of poor workmanship. I asked the sales manager about this and he never responded. Within another few days the Pulte Group had applied the Stucco so you could no longer SEE the cracks instead of actually FIXING the cracks and other areas of shoddy workmanship. On top of all of this they agreed to provide a mortgage for one of the homes under certain terms with a written approval more than 60 days before the scheduled closing. Then just 8 days before the closing they contacted me and completely changed the terms giving me no option but to accept their terms or lose my deposits of over $40,000. When I expressed that this might be a problem with less than 8 days before the closing they sent me a letter telling me I was in DEFAULT and they would be taking my entire deposits if I did not close on their originally scheduled closing dates.

These people are not professional and they apparently have significantly reduced their construction standards. I am not sure if they are just scamming people for the deposits so they can re-sell the property for a better profit or not but I can say with certainty that they are completely unprofessional and NO ONE should do business with these people. These were my 2nd and 3rd Pulte Homes so I was previously satisfied with this company. Something has seriously changed and I would be very wary of doing any purchases with this company. Don't risk your hard earned money. Avoid The Pulte Group at all cost.