Any Meritage House owner out there? (Sugar Land, Atascocita: neighborhood, inspections, closing)

[RaviHouston]

Hello Folks,

We are planning on signing up for a house in Telfair, Sugar Land and want to find out about your experience with Meritage builder.

1. Do they do a good job?
2. Anything we need to watch out for?
3. Do they negotiate at all? Insofar they seem to be inflexible.
4. What is the customer service like post the purchase?

Thanks!

[chris_ut]

I bought a Meritage in 2008 in another part of the city. They did do a good job. A lot of the building comes down to who your super is. Meet him and make sure you are comfortable with him. Ask how long he has been building in that neighborhood, you want to avoid a neighborhood where you go through 3 supers over the course of building your house. Nothing in particular to watch out for that you wouldn't with any builder. They would not negotiate on the price on a new build but we were able to get them to throw in additional upgrades. We had a few minor issues with the house in the year after closing. We called our super directly and he resolved all within a week of our call. I never went to the main company customer service or warranty.

[lhafer]

Originally Posted by chris_ut

I bought a Meritage in 2008 in another part of the city. They did do a good job. A lot of the building comes down to who your super is. Meet him and make sure you are comfortable with him. Ask how long he has been building in that neighborhood, you want to avoid a neighborhood where you go through 3 supers over the course of building your house. Nothing in particular to watch out for that you wouldn't with any builder. They would not negotiate on the price on a new build but we were able to get them to throw in additional upgrades. We had a few minor issues with the house in the year after closing. We called our super directly and he resolved all within a week of our call. I never went to the main company customer service or warranty.

Pretty much same here. We built with them up in the NE side in Atascocita. Had a GREAT Super!! Made all the difference. We had a couple of issues during build (specs that we wanted changed) that were fixed right away and without issue. The price was pretty firm, but we got quite a bit in upgrades. All in all very happy with them.

The one thing we did have some pretty big issues with was our carpet pad. We paid to upgrade our pad to their highest available. We tried to visit the site as often as possible but missed the day they put the pad down. So before closed on the house we wanted to make sure the pad was what we paid for. We pulled a small chunk from the corner of a closet. It didn't look like what was in the design center. Took it to the builder. They said it was the same. We took the sample to 2 independent carpet/flooring stores who said it was NOT the grade we paid for. We had to go all the way up to the VP of the company to contest it. But they ended up pulling up all the carpet and replacing all the padding in the entire house (a 3,000sqft house, mainly carpet). So all ended well. I would not finance through them though.

[RaviHouston]

Thanks much for your replies! Ihafer - the carpet incident does concern me!

[dadsearchingforahouse]

Ravi
Make sure you get your own inspections done at various stages (after foundation, after stick built, after sheet rock) - sure it would cost more but will definitely help in the long run. We build our first home in 2004 and the inspection helped us a lot - it was not Meritage Homes though.