Complaint Review: Landmark Home Warranty - Nationwide

This is a cautionary tale of why you should not use home warranty companies, particularly Landmark Home Warranty. In it, you will find the story of a company who would do whatever it could to not fulfill the terms of its contract, instead opting to consistently shift the blame to the homeowners.

First, a little background… Back in September 2016, my soon-to-be wife and I so excited to finally put our days of renting behind us. Of course, the process of buying a home, particularly your first, is long and frustrating, but we got through it and now own a beautiful 2,000 square foot home in the northern part of San Antonio, Texas.  During the process, we had a home inspection done back at the end of July. In it, we discovered that the air conditioning unit was dirty and it was recommended that we have service done. As part of the settlement with the sellers, we asked they handle the cleaning. They did so back on July 27, 2016.

Now we can begin our tale… On Thursday, June 8, 2017, in the middle of a very hot Texas summer, our air conditioning unit went out. Not owning a home before, I did some research and while there are things I could consider (like seeing if replacing a capacitor was a necessity), I didn’t feel 100% comfortable doing maintenance on something as complex and important as our air conditioner. My wife and I then recalled that as part of our home purchase, we had a home warranty. We searched for our information and found the company’s name was Landmark Home Warranty. We hoped they would be able to fix the problem quickly. This was our first mistake.

We filed a claim online and my wife called them early the next morning in order to make certain the ball was rolling, We provided additional needed information and were charged $70 to start the process of finding a contractor to do the work. The search didn’t take long, because the moment we were charged, we received an email stating that a company had been chosen “based on their quality scores, speed of service and proximity to [our] home.”

I won’t get into a ton of detail regarding our contractor. We’ve already posted negative reviews regarding them. But I find it interesting that a company who has been around for less than a year can have any real “quality scores.” I’ll get more into their “quality” later. I can’t really speak to the proximity of our home, but regarding “speed of service?” Granted, this process was started on a Thursday evening but when it’s hot in Texas, time is of the essence, when you’re not able to get them out until the following Monday, you start to wonder.

The contractor gave us this diagnosis: “Found blocked evaporator coil. Compressor is getting hot and switching into thermal overload. attempted to help compressor with start assist kit and it wouldn't help. Unit has not been maintained, Unit failed from lack of maintenance.” While the contractor promised me he would send the diagnosis to the warranty company that evening, he waited until the morning. Not really keeping up on that “speed of service” thing, are we? And certainly, I was questioning the “quality” at this point too. Oh, and the contractor was more than happy to sell me a new air conditioning unit at the price he would charge Landmark. That would only cost us thousands of dollars. No big deal, right?

It took until Friday, June 16 to receive an email and call from Landmark, formally telling us our claim had been denied. The denial email stated that “because the failure above was caused by lack of maintenance, Landmark will not be able to provide coverage at this point in time” and that according to our contract, section D, paragraph 3, “repairs or replacement required as a result of failure to clean or maintain, according to manufacturer specifications.”

While I researched the manufacturer’s specifications, my wife was told over the phone that Landmark sees proper maintenance as being quarterly and that the coils should be cleaned at that point. Of course, no one in their right mind would pay to have that service done THAT regularly. That’s just insane.

I, however, was having better luck with the manufacturer’s maintenance specifications. I managed to find a service manual for our air conditioning unit. In it, it stated that coils needed to be cleaned annually. Remember when I said that the previous owners had the unit maintained back on July 27, 2016? We filed the claim on June 8, 2017. We had 42 days still within manufacturer’s suggested maintenance cycle before it would be out of that period.

Landmark called us the next day, Saturday, June 17, 2017 to tell us our claim had been reopened, pending verification of the new information as presented.

I should probably take a moment here to tell you that at that time, we had been displaced from our home for a week. While we braved it the first few nights, by Saturday, June 10, the thermostat was showing mid-90s during the middle of the day. With two humans and a dog, we needed to get out of our house. We spent five nights in a hotel in San Antonio and had fled to my wife’s parents home in West Texas after that as we were visiting them over Father’s Day weekend anyway. We were tired. And expelling a lot more money than we needed to or should have been at that point in time.

We came back to San Antonio on Monday, June 19, 2017 to another phone call from Landmark that informed us our claim had been denied again, and that the people who worked on it in July 2016 and Landmark’s own contractor suggesting that we had not replaced our filters regularly. We were livid. We I personally checked the filters monthly and changed them probably once a quarter, depending on the dust buildup. On that note, we threatened legal action.

Of course, even if we could produce receipts showing we purchased the filters at those times, it’s not like we took pictures of them every time we changed them out. At that point, we threatened, and are still considering litigation against Landmark for this issue. Regardless, our third mistake was not keeping receipts and taking dated photos of changing our filters. Silly, sure, but if we ever have a home warranty again (which is doubtful), it’d be good to have.

Oh, what about our second mistake? Right. I forgot.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, we had gotten some advice that if someone suggests that you spend a lot of money to repair or replace a problematic system in your house, you should get a second opinion. Before we left San Antonio on Wednesday, June 14, we called to get a second opinion from another air conditioner repair company. We could have gotten them in the following day, Thursday, June 15, but if we needed major work done, they wouldn’t be able to do that right away, it made sense to hold off until the following week.

This service provider showed up on the afternoon of Monday, June 19. While he agreed our unit was dirty, he knew he could get us back online shortly. True to his word, he managed to figure out the problem was not a blocked evaporator coil or a compressor switching into thermal overload or even a dirty air filter, but a worn-out capacitor! (A capacitor? I said that I thought that was it back eleven days before all of this! Okay, maybe if I felt more comfortable with my mechanical skills, I could have avoided this whole thing. Maybe that was really my first mistake.) Not only that, but he replaced it and cleaned our unit for less than $400, less than our home warranty costs annually and far less than the thousands of dollars Landmark’s service provider wanted us to pay.

The moral of this story is simple: Do not buy home warranties. But if you must, most definitely do not buy home warranties from Landmark Home Warranty. They are dishonest. They do not stand behind their product. They hire horrible service providers that are not based upon “quality scores” or “speed of service.” They are out for a quick buck and will look for any possible reason to put back on you, the customer, so they don’t have to fix a problem.

Sadly, it’s likely too late for us. We could not spend another day in a hotel or relying on friends or family to help us while we waited for this situation to resolve itself. Plus, we wanted to be home. As we did not go with an “approved contractor” to do our work, we won’t get anything back out of it. But if this review changes the mind of one person considering getting a home warranty from Landmark Home Warranty, it’s done its job.

The End.