Investigative work

This post really has nothing to do with the house per se, rather an investigation into third party complaints we have heard about "Reid's". You will figure out why the quotes in a minute. This is probably going to be long, I like to hear myself type.
Here's a little story : When we chose the builder for our Home, a lot of the initial information came from word of mouth. We knew people who had built homes in the past, and got to hear their experiences with multiple builders around the London area and elsewhere. Multiple times, Reid's Heritage Homes was mentioned, and every time, these firsthand tellings had nothing but amazing things to say. In fact some people were planning on, or had, built multiple Reid's Heritage Homes. We did come upon many people who had nothing but terrible experiences with some builders, these will remain nameless. Doing more digging through the London Home Builders Association website, we found more great things about Reid's Heritage Homes. Multiple Awards had been given to them, including Builder of the Year for 2007. Investigating further led to the Ontario Home Builders Association, where again Reid's Heritage Homes had multiple awards for 2007, including design awards for their houses and Green Builder of the Year for 2007. Did the Better Business Bureau have a ton of registered complaints about Reid's Heritage homes? Nope. How about the Warranty company? Nope, in fact yet another Builder of the Year award there. Are these guys too good to be true? there must be SOMEONE who has had issue, I mean these guys build a lot of houses.
One day , while going through the Demo house, we came across a complaint first hand, well kind of. This guy purchased his house second hand, so he was the second owner of the home in question. He was coming over to inspect the Demo house to see what they had done differently than his house. When we asked if he had any issue with his house or the builder, he quickly gave answer. Apparently the loft in his house was "useless", too many stairs to get to it, hmmm. Another issue was the en suite bathroom was much too small, he came to see if they made it bigger in the Demo , he thought they did but measured and was incorrect. The odd thing here is, if he actually built the house and didn't get the loft option, the en suite would have been bigger (the stairs get in the way) solving both issues. He parted from us with a "You better watch them closely, they like to cut corners". Finally proof that Reid's Heritage Homes isn't infallible! Yeah I know that is stretching it.
After finally choosing Reid's Heritage Homes as our builder, we felt very confident. Then one day talking to someone at work whom I was just informing of our decision, I got an odd comment. "You went with Reid? be very careful, I had a friend who built with them and had a very bad experience". Hmm odd, I had yet to find a complaint, let alone a "very bad experience". O well, they can't be perfect, I still think we made the correct choice. Then the next week, the same thing " I had a buddy that built with them, they are horrible". Horrible? Really? Wow, seemed like a rather harsh wording to me. Everyone has different expectations I guess , good AND bad are relative terms. Over the next couple of weeks, we had a couple more people tell us to "be careful" with Reid etc. It started to get rather startling, I mean I did some serious checking into this. This is the largest purchase we have ever made, and I wasn't going to just pick some schmo off the street to do it. An odd thing happened next. Driving north of where we currently live, there was a small sign by the side of the road. We stopped at the red light by it, and what was the sign for? A company called Reid Homes. Yes, there are two builders with a name that close, in the same damn city. The weird thing was, this company hadn't come up in any of the research I had done about builders. So I went back to all the builder associations, the BBB, Tarion etc, and what did I find? Actually nothing at all. The London Home Builders Association doesn't list them as a builder in the area, odd. The Ontario Home Builders Association has no mention of them at all. The Tarion Warranty Corporation doesn't mention them at all. The Better Business Bureau has no listing of them, at least as a member. According to their website, they have been in business since 1947, of course what that means I don't know. Sifting through their website there is no mention at all about a warranty, only that you get 3 hours with the builder at the end of your first year when you go through your end of year inspection. Actually , going through their website doesn't inform you much at all.
Now I am not trying to present Reid Homes as some sort of piece of crap builder, I do not have any direct evidence of the sort. It just seems an odd coincidence that there are 2 builders with names so close, in the same business , in the same city. One of them is going to have a better reputation than the other. What comes to mind though is that one of these businesses looks like a "leech"so to speak. What happened with us and the bad experiences, which may or may not be Reid Homes related, started to make our builder look "bad" so to speak. This also works the other way. Because the names are so close, it is easy to get confused between the two. The builder with the great reputation can also pass on that reputation to another undeserving company. I couldn't say how many , if ever, this has happened, but mentioning this situation to others makes them draw the same conclusion. Going back to clarify from the people reporting bad experiences, they cannot tell me right off which builder is which.
Even if there is no connection to this found information and what I have heard, it makes me feel better. When there are two companies with essentially the same name in an area and you go by third party word-of-mouth stories, there is no telling who it could be about. There are just that many more people out there that could have a "horrible" experience with one, which ends up placing future "blame" on the other.
Hearing peoples experiences with a builder was rather high on my list of how to decide who to build our home for us, so when we started to hear conflicting testimonies AFTER the decision, it really muddied the waters so to speak. After dealing with all the people that we have dealt with so far at Reid's Heritage Homes , I don't think there is any question that we made the correct decision though.

Ok piece of mind post completed. This post took a while, (when I mean a while, I mean a couple of days) so it rambles on and around a lot, I lost my train of thought a couple of times. After finding that Reid Homes sign I had to make a post though, just because it was such an odd thing.