Business ProfileforSchell Brothers LLC

We bought a home in Richmond, VA. Generally, the experience was positive. Schell has great floor plans with great curb appeal. Definitely not cookie-cutter. Their sales and decorating teams do a great job. And we were able to customize quite a bit. However, the warranty service manager was less than helpful. He frequently marked warranty items as “completed” when they weren’t. He explained they were duplicate when they weren’t. His logic was the same contractor would be addressing multiple items so he marked the “duplicate” items as completed. Their system requires you to categorize items and there is no way to group by contractor. So, when they marked items completed, you lost track of what was really done. They also took FOREVER to address items and they showed up at random times. We eventually got frustrated and fixed many items ourselves. They ran drains from the foundation to the middle of the yard and just stopped right in the dirt. As a result, we had very marshy conditions and spent over $10k to mitigate. They used engineered wood I-beam joists and “over-spanned” them (larger than 15’). As a result, we have considerable bounce in our floors. Dishes rattle and lamps shake. You feel like you’re on a trampoline when someone walks by. I brought this up to the Richmond division president and she apologized but basically said “that’s our product.” To fix this, we are going to spend more than $23k to add additional steel beams to support the floor. This is not at all what I expected when I paid $755k for my house 4 years ago. To be fair, I had two different structural engineers look at the floor bounce problem and they both said this was a well-constructed house. But they said Schell built to the code requirement, which is the bare minimum. Would I buy from Schell again? Maybe, but I would do things a lot differently and would not have assumed their commitment to happiness meant I was going to get exceptional value in my house.