Complaint Review: Keystone Custom Homes - Lancaster Pennsylvania

My husband and I decided to build our dream house a year ago. We met with a home advisor and she was eager to get things started. After meeting with her and going over numbers, I began to get a bad feeling about the situation. Numbers were miscalculated by thousands of dollars and she constantly made errors when figuring up options.

When we went back to the home advisor to discuss numbers and financing, there was a lot of pressure from her to go with an adjustable rate. I was certain I did not want an adjustable rate but she continued to pressure. After she figured the numbers incorrectly yet again by about $10,000, I spoke to the president of sales at Keystone and said we would like a new home advisor.

We were directed to a new home advisor. He was very nice but again, many errors with numbers. They deducted a "premium" lot fee of $10,000 causing our payment numbers to be off. My husband and I caught the error and pointed it out to him.

After several weeks, we decided to move forward with the house. I didn't have the most confidence in the company but we really wanted this house. Well, that was just the beginning of our nightmare. The builder broke ground about 3 weeks late. They called us on a Thursday night and said we needed to be out there the next morning to walk the lot before breaking ground. Come to find out, they actually just went ahead and broke ground the day before without following their own procedure.

After the foundation was dug, we noticed that our house was very close to the road. We measure how far back our house set and measured others in the development. Ours about 25 feet closer to the road. We made them aware before they poured the foundation but they hurried up and poured the foundation the next morning so we could not make them move it. When I asked why they would put it so close to the road, their response in an email was that it saved Keystone money to do it this way.

Weeks went by and our materials (stone facing) were not delivered on time. Since the builder screwed around and started late, they could not grade our yard or pour the top coat on our driveway or paint the exterior trim and doors. In fact, we settled in December and they did not complete all fo this until the 2nd week of June (2 weeks after their own contract said they needed to be finished).

Other issues we have had were/and still are, our shingles are falling off of our roof (and they don't bother coming out for weeks and sometimes a month!), yard not graded properly (major divets and they didnt grade to the property line), siding buckling, flashing rippling, heat didn't work when moved in in December, AC didn't work, gas meter installed cooked, holes in wood trim (some the size of a house key), trim not sanded and painted thoroughly.

The biggest issues we have had though are with the financing. When we went to (both) our home advisors, we explained we needed to keep our payment (including PMI) at $2000 or less. They "worked" the numbers and came back with just over $2000. We agree that we could afford that. Then in the spring, we were notfied by our mortgage company that we didn't have enough money in our escrow account (keystones finance people did not withhold enough) so our payment went up $100 a month. Then last week, i received our school tax bill and contacted the mortgage company to verify they received it. That is when I found out that Keystone didn't figure nearly enough. Our payment is going up another $300 a month! That is now over $400 a month more than we were told it would be less than a year ago.

At this point, we have no idea how we will come up with this extra money. This all happened because Keystones people "worked" the numbers to get them where they needed to be on paper to make it look like we can afford this house.

We also took advantage of their Equity Promise Program. It looks good on paper but don't be fooled. We received a notice in the mail that they have not paid our taxes on our hold house and they were 4 months past due. The Equity Promise people of course had excuses as to why they weren't paid. In my opinion, it is their job to pay these taxes according to their own contract. There is no reason not to pay them on time. I have now emailed them twice in the past two weeks to verify they have resolved the issue but of course, I receive no response.

So after everything, it was the biggest mistake to build with Keystone. The house is not worth the issues we need to deal with. We are talking about thousands and thousands of dollars of mistakes that they make. They have poor follow up, poor workmanship and they just don't care. Do NOT ever build with these people!! It is not worth it.