Has Anyone Bought A Mattamy Home? (Waconia: sales, 2009, how much)

[30cent]

I am looking at a house in Waconia That is in the New Pinehills devolopment. The builder is mattamy homes. (formally Homes by Chase) I was just wondering if anyone has purchased from them. Are the homes Quality built? Was the sales process smooth? Any feed back would be great. Also How is the School district in Waconia?

[Backinminnesota]

We purchased a Mattamy home in the Pinehill subdivision of Waconia, MN. The house is wonderful - the quality of the construction seems good, the response time on warranty items seems good. However, we are not at all happy with a few things. First, although the housing market has fallen, we purchased our house when the market was already pretty bad (not even a year ago). Now, Mattamy is selling the new homes at 30%+ less than what we paid, and we bought a home that had been on the market for a long time. We wonder how in the world they keep selling homes so quickly when the housing market is apparently so bad. There are at least 5 homes under construction now, and they keep selling. One just barely got finished and it's already occupied. Now we know - they are pricing them BARGAIN BASEMENT! Do not buy into this neighborhood if you are considering your future property value - do not trust that the builder will not under-cut your price - the neighborhood is still in development, so they have lots of room to sell cheap. Second, we are also VERY UNHAPPY with what the builder is allowing to happen to the exteriors of the homes and the general appearance of the neighborhood. When we purchased, we were assured that there would be no parking of trailers, garbage cans, ladders, snow mobiles, ice shacks, etc... in yards and on driveways. So far, most of the people who have moved in since we bought have ALL of these things. One family even parks their CARS on their front LAWN. And Mattamy does nothing. There are covenants, but they do not enforce them. I wish we never would have moved here. Do not trust the people working for Mattamy. They will do anything to sell a house.

[homesearching]

I would never go with this company! They are not trustworthy and will tell you things just to string you along. They apparently have a "waiting list" of people who want certain houses only to be never called back. I wasted a huge amount of time there only to be lied to and avoided when they didn't want to face me. It was weird. The front salespeople are very slow to answer their phones in general as well. They will not get you things they said they would provide as well. "I will email that to you", is what they say but you you will never receive the info. They also make promises they apparently can't deliver because "corporate" or whatever "manager" won't agree to it (later on you will find this out when you are emotionally attached to a house). Don't expect them to acknowledge this -- let alone apologize for it as well. Also, the land is really cheap where they are building Pinehill. It's right in front of a hideous water tower, but they charge huge premiums for it. Even though they offer you different homes to buy and you get to pick your lot, if you don't max out a "premium lot" they will drop you like a hot potato. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is don't waste your time!

[Clifford63]

Originally Posted by Backinminnesota

We purchased a Mattamy home in the Pinehill subdivision of Waconia, MN. The house is wonderful - the quality of the construction seems good, the response time on warranty items seems good. However, we are not at all happy with a few things. First, although the housing market has fallen, we purchased our house when the market was already pretty bad (not even a year ago). Now, Mattamy is selling the new homes at 30%+ less than what we paid, and we bought a home that had been on the market for a long time. We wonder how in the world they keep selling homes so quickly when the housing market is apparently so bad. There are at least 5 homes under construction now, and they keep selling. One just barely got finished and it's already occupied. Now we know - they are pricing them BARGAIN BASEMENT! Do not buy into this neighborhood if you are considering your future property value - do not trust that the builder will not under-cut your price - the neighborhood is still in development, so they have lots of room to sell cheap. Second, we are also VERY UNHAPPY with what the builder is allowing to happen to the exteriors of the homes and the general appearance of the neighborhood. When we purchased, we were assured that there would be no parking of trailers, garbage cans, ladders, snow mobiles, ice shacks, etc... in yards and on driveways. So far, most of the people who have moved in since we bought have ALL of these things. One family even parks their CARS on their front LAWN. And Mattamy does nothing. There are covenants, but they do not enforce them. I wish we never would have moved here. Do not trust the people working for Mattamy. They will do anything to sell a house.

You should look into the covenant and consider legal action if there is big time violations like this. I would think others might also not like seeing what is happening either. Builder often hold control of the association until development is nearly completed and then control is passed. If there has been no ammendments to the rules, you stand a good chance of forcing the builder to address the violations. Might get some people hacked off, but you should have right to expect things to be how they were sold.

Pricing is a different thing altoghether. We build a home last year as well with a different builder and prices have dropped on resale for sure. We bought well below peak prices which is good, but I would hate to think about resale today. It would probably be a bad situation. Builders are still dropping prices just to stay in business. We have two empty lots near us, and I would hate to see what the price might be. Guessing it might be 15% less than what we paid. Hard to pin anything on the builder because the market is what drives pricing. If you end up staying where you are at and things get turned back around, you should end up ok. What will happen is those people building at the lowest point will end up with huge equity compared to those who build before prices hit the low point. Fear of buying before things hit bottom is one of the things that is making many people wait right now. If demmand gets pent up too long, it very well could end up where we see a spike in new homes being started again. That will end the bargain pricing rather quickly.

[MN-Born-n-Raised]

New homes are falling because the contractors are willing to work for less, the price of land is dropping, their subcontractor labor costs are dropping, and some key material costs have also dropped.

Therefore builders are seeing 10%-15% drop in their costs inside of 6 months (from mid 2008 to early 2009). It is a volatile and competitive market. I'll bet you checked out the market pretty carefully before you bought and I predict they were very much in line with the rest of the market. At any given time, there isn't that much fat in building costs for them to simply undercut the market by choosing to undercut themselves. We are coming to the end of falling new home prices unless the cost of land continues to drop. Labor and material prices have bottomed out. I think you might be jumping to conclusions as to how much flexibility the builder has to "undercut" the prices.


I too would consider legal action if the covenants are not being enforced. In our city, we have strict city laws on what you can have in your driveway, etc. If no one places those calls, the city won't bother enforcing them. Give this option a try. We have made those uncomfortable calls a few times in 20 years to help motivate people to get the crap out of their yards. The thing is, some people just don't get it and they are messy people. We have one neighbor that had an old car in the street and someone broke the window. It was rained on for three weeks with glass on the ground before I called the city. As I said, some people just don't get it and we live in an area where there are some bigger nicer homes.

[hammy5]

Are you in an association where you pay dues? Because if not, the builder can have all the covenants it wants but does not have to do anything about it. We used to live in a neighborhood where the developer wrote out the "rules" of the neighborhood but never did anything about it when people broke the rules. And they did. We did not pay association dues so there was really nothing we could do.

Kristine

[ASL terp]

We are looking to relocate to Waconia too, maybe by December. We just found a great house in Waconia Landing. However when we went to lunch and met the "locals" we were told not to buy there by a few people. Just wondering if anyone knows anything about families in that subdivision. We have two boys 8 & 9 and it looked like a great family neighborhood, but now we are a little worried about it.

Thanks.

[Sarah Maske]

Waconia is well known as a great community. Darling downtown and you can get homes on or close to Lake Waconia (or with deeded access) for much less than the surrounding areas.

As far as builders are concerned and because of my job I can't discriminate, but, ask, ask, ask lots and lots of questions in the community. See what the locals say, knock on doors and see as many houses as you can. Look for shoddy sheet rocking (cracking seams), poor caulking work around tiles and windows, foundation cracks, moisture and any bulging in outdoor siding...this is a good start. I know a good architect who could give you more info and good vs. bad developers. Message me if you want her contact info.

Good luck!