Unexpected Surprises
South Of The Border... Down Mexico Way...
When you start building in a foreign country, the best laid plans can go awry in unpredictable ways.
Mexico operates differently than the rest of North America, and that holds particularly true when it comes to expectations in homebuilding. What follows is a brief synopsis of some of the ways things have gone badly wrong for our friends and customers (prior to their engaging our services). This isn't intended to scare you, but rather to give you a flavor for how a project can go from dream to nightmare in short order. All of these occurrences were preventable, and could have been avoided if the victim had known the ropes and the players, as we do.
Devil in the Details
The old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words, holds especially true when it comes to some materials. For instance, block. The stuff your house will be made out of. On a recent Sunday, I was driving around our builds, checking on things with our project manager, and noted a new site going up next door to one of our new builds. Being nosy, I went over and looked at what the competition was up to. Yikes. No good, is the answer. The following photos are of the block they had just taken delivery of and were using to build the house, and the retaining wall. First, their's, and then second photo, our's sitting next door. Note the difference on the edges, but mainly, on the porousness of the block. Hint: More porous equals worse quality. I wish I had gotten closer but you can get the idea.
The competition. Crumbling edges, porous even from a distance.
Our block. Sharp edges, hardly any porousness.
But so what? What does it mean? Well, the short answer is that there is really crummy, cheap block out there. It will crack easily, crumble with time, and is mostly sand, rather than mostly concrete. But don't take my word for it. I'll now impart an age-old secret, handed down from builder to builder at our secret society meetings: the drop test.
The quickest and surest way to tell whether you have decent block or not, is to hold the block out at chest level, and drop it onto dirt. Crummy block will break apart into a bunch of pieces. Good block will remain intact, or occasionally break into a neat half (if it hits a rock in the dirt just right). But mostly it will hold together. Now watch the result of the drop test on the place next door, and then ours (the first is their's after a drop, the second is our system in action on ours.
Their's. Doh! And it had been raining the day before, so the ground was even a little soft...
Our's. Don't try this at home, and if you do, make sure you wear heavy duty steel-toe crocks, like our trained specialist here, in case you don't factor clearing your feet into the equation...
So what's the end result? The builder next door is using material we wouldn't advise using, which will cause mayhem down the road with cracking and the like. But the client probably got a super good price, not stopping to wonder how that happened. I think you can see how some builders cut the corners on materials. They are using junk 6 inch block, we only use 8 inch high quality block. Imagine a retaining wall built out of their block, versus ours. Think it through. There are no sweetheart deals around here. You pay now, or pay big later. That's the harsh reality.
True stories. And it goes on every day.
"I Am An Artist, Let Me Design Your Home"
One group of investors bought a lot in a tony new development in San Jose, where it costs well over half a million just for the dirt. The architect, who was recommended to them by the development owners, greeted them enthusiastically, and assured them that they would have a dream home designed as only a real talent could do it. They, being from the US, agreed upon a reasonable price (to them), and nodded along with his representations of what it would take to design the home (120 days) and build it (18 months).
What's wrong with this picture? Well, for starters, they paid almost 4 times the local rate for the design, which appears to have consisted of modifying someone else's plan, and then pushing "print." To make matters worse, they couldn't get the architect on the phone when they came to town for 4 days to review the progress 90 days into their design phase. They left, sunburned, but never having seen anything produced. The duration quoted to build is almost double what Cape Development quotes - typically 8 to 10 months, depending upon the size of the home, the difficulty of the terrain, and the CC&Rs. And the price the respected gentleman quoted our friends was over a quarter million dollars more than we typically build the same house for - or roughly 35% more than reasonable.
Once they saw their preliminary plans, they sent them to us for costing on the construction. After reviewing them, we recommended scrapping them, and having our team create an open, flowing, owner-friendly design with the primary amenities on the main floor (rather than the boxy design they received, which had visitors opening the front door to be on the bedroom level, and required walking down a flight of stairs to get to the kitchen/living/dining/master bedroom/entertainment level). They took our advice, and we were able to turn their design in a fraction of the time they'd already endured, and for a deep discount to the remaining balance their old architect wanted to create finished plans.
One can only imagine how their construction phase would have gone if they had continued down their original path. We were able to keep them from getting stuck with an impractically-designed white elephant, and instead created the right home for their needs.
This Will Go Down In Your Permanent Record
A different group went in on building a home in one of the high-end neighborhoods on the corridor. Their builder was building two other homes there, and they liked his work - and they especially liked his price, which was aggressive. So they inked the deal, and everything went well from afar, until month number 7 - then, they couldn't get a hold of him. He didn't answer his email, his cell phone went straight to message, and his office just rang and rang. After a few weeks of this, they got on a plane, and discovered that all work had stopped on their house. It was about 80% completed, but there was no roof on it to speak of, and only half the windows had been installed. This had them concerned, as they had paid in advance, every few months, as the house moved along, without any real timeline or goals articulated. After asking around, they discovered that one of the other homes he'd been building had also been left in a similar state of disrepair - apparently their well-thought-of builder wasn't great at budgeting, because he was forced to wait to finish houses until he got more cash from beginning new ones. Who knows where he ran off track...now he was forever behind, and never had enough to finish.
They eventually got it done, after 15 months of annoyance, arguments, promises, threats, apologies...the builder had gotten two more house contracts on the corridor, so could finally put the crew back on and finish. In his mind he was an honorable man - he fulfilled his obligation under difficult circumstances. Never mind that the house took 6 months too long to complete, and that it could have been wrecked in a storm. He did his best. Life is hard. One learns patience.
It's All In The Name...?
A simple room addition in Cabo Del Sol. How hard could that be, especially since the client was willing to pay top dollar for the "big name" architect who originally designed and built the home? Friends of ours, they really felt that using the original fellow was critical to maintaining the integrity of the design and the feel of the home. We looked at what they wanted, which was a room, four walls, a tile roof, with an attached bath, and shrugged. If they were willing to pay almost twice our rate for a rectangle with a roof and windows, OK, hard to see how that could go wrong. Well, never say never. The architect inked the deal, and then, of course, was involved in "real" projects paying him millions for large custom homes. So they never saw him again. He farmed it out to his cousin, who has a taste for the finer things in life, like tequila and leisure time, and who never quite got around to doing any of the things he committed to. We've actually built whole custom homes in the time it has taken to build a room addition, so watched in bemused admiration of his skills in dodging calls, avoiding meetings, and generally managing to miss any and all real work. Where this ends, nobody knows, but it's an underscoring of the idea that unless you represent really serious money to a big name, you are likely to be delegated to the lowest denominator in the organization.
Why Pay More Than You Have To?
Another acquaintance of ours hired a builder with good references, who mocked the pricing he had gotten from two other reputable builders, both of whom were too booked up to do his home. That should have been a giveaway. This builder dismissed all other quotes as a rip-off, the locals taking advantage of vulnerable "newbies", an insult to everyone's intelligence. He quoted a great price per square foot, and was anxious to get started. The owner was delighted at his enthusiasm, and a deal was made. Crews of workers arrived, and swarmed like ants over the site. Now this was what the owner was expecting! As the first few months went by, the low price crept up - "Oh, Senor, that didn't include the building permit, or the retaining walls, or the cistern, or the water treatment plant, or the dirt required to create a platform. I broke out everything in my quote - I thought you understood!"
Soon, $10 more per square foot turned into $20 more, and the great deal started to turn into a great deal for the builder. Then, after a large payment to cover the domes over the dining room and entryway, and a huge increase in the cost of necessary materials, the builder appeared in a new truck, to inform the owner that his crew would be back in a few days - there was an emergency at one of the other sites that required his best guys. The owner never saw him again - or rather, he didn't see him for several months, even though every week he was told that this week would be the week when the crew returned. Ultimately, our friend hired a different contractor, and is suing the "good price" fellow - a lot of fun in a foreign country, where he doesn't speak much of the language, and his attorneys have explained that, while it isn't right, his experience happens all the time and isn't thought of as shocking.
The project wound up costing almost 40% more than he had budgeted, and he had to really stretch to finish his place.
Dirt, or Platinum?
A decent chap who bought a lot from our brokerage (Cape Realty Associates) hired an architect, who did a wonderful job on his plans - or so it appeared when he paid the man upon delivery of the finished blueprints. Everyone was happy, and the customer decided to have the architect build the home. One of the challenges of the terrain was that it would require a fair amount of dirt to fill in, if he wanted to build from a level where he could do two stories instead of three. No big deal, the unofficial estimate showed the cost of the dirt as around $5,000, with another $2500 for the workers to roll it and compress it. With these numbers in mind, he went ahead and commissioned plans for a two story home rather than a three story. The design was great. Everyone was excited.
Then, when this gentleman went to get the formal quote from the company that moves dirt, the cost of the earth and the retaining walls and the labor came in at $90K. Needless to say, this was a huge disconnect, and it so impacted the cost of the home that he wound up having to go back to the drawing board, and commission a three story plan. What did he learn? To deal with people who know what they are talking about, and don't throw numbers around lightly. He became a customer of Cape Development, incidentally, after the official quote from the architect on the house came in $100 grand higher than he'd been led to believe it would cost, NOT including the dirt.
And the epilogue was that once the "great" plans were submitted for final approval from the homeowner's association, they required a week's worth of work from our architect to fix inconsistencies and items that violated the CC&Rs.
Death By A Thousand Cuts
Another acquaintance built his dream house, without a lot of hassles. Then again, this was 4 years ago, and it was a small place, so nothing too complicated was involved. He's been living there happily, and then one day a gentleman from Social Security appeared, to indicate that one month of the construction period on his house was unaccounted for from a Social Security tax standpoint - that his builder might not have paid the money owed for his crew, and if so, that the obligation was now the owner's, including interest for 4 years, and a penalty assessment - unless he could produce records for that month proving the tax had been paid. Our friend scrambled like mad to find the builder, who had long since moved on to other pastures, and wound up having to shell out $18K or so within a few weeks - no records from the builder, no proof, big fine. He hadn't known that he had to keep everything for at least 5 years, and to demand from his builder proof of the SS payments having been made. Goes to show that even if you have been here for awhile, you learn something new every day.
Do You Have Any Idea How Much Concrete Costs?
A friend of ours has a home, built by the "marquee" onsite builder, which has suspicious cracking and crumbling in the sidewalks and base of his new home - after only a few months. He asked us to come out and look at it - and the problem was pretty clear. The workers hadn't mixed the cement well, so there were pockets where the sand content was too high, and so crumbly and unstable. Either that, or someone had skimped on the cement-to-sand ratio, in order to slip a few dollars into his pocket for the weekend. Either way, his problem was crumbly, unstable concrete around the edges of every area we could see. The builder assured him that it was all good, and that sometimes the climate "did that to things." The builder had been paid in full, and the construction signed off on, so there wasn't any recourse.
Who knows how the rest of the house is built? We didn't like what we saw, but it's what you can't see that can kill you. Literally. He's stuck, having trusted the high-profile company that built for him. And because he doesn't know what he's looking at, and wasn't in town for much of his build, he wouldn't have caught it anyway. Really a shame.
That Depends On What You Mean By "Is"
A beautiful home in a top golf course community is having extensive foundation work done, a few years after it was built by a "reputable" company in town. The problem? The builder didn't spec in sidewalks around the base, and so water had collected around the edges of the house from the grass they watered regularly on the perimeter, and had caused serious degradation of the foundation soil and concrete. And the Canadian couple hadn't even thought about anything like that, so they hadn't requested sidewalks. When asked if it is standard to build without a sidewalk around the house, the builder told them, "Si, it is, unless sometimes it isn't." Short version is that what they didn't know cost them dearly.
What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate
Yet another friend of ours contracted one of the more reputable architect/builders in Cabo. They got a decent price quoted, and liked the design they saw, and were anxious to get things moving. They signed up, and soon the building site was underway. These folks live in Cabo, so they were able to be on the job every week or so to check progress.
After one of the region's storms had passed, they noticed that the massive, three-story retaining wall that was built to keep their new home from sliding down the hill was bulging in the middle of the wall, and had started cracking at the top. The foundation was already poured and some walls had gone up, so they were committed to their builder. Which is a shame, as it turns out that he had miscalculated the structural requirements for the wall, hence the damage. After nearly a month of stoppage while he tried to figure out what to do, the contractor came back with the admission that it was his fault, so he would tear down the wall, and build a new one, at no charge. Meanwhile, a crisis of confidence was in the air, as calculating the stress on a retaining wall is pretty remedial, and if that was botched, what else would be botched as construction progressed? We walked the homesite, and noticed that the interior walls were constructed using 4-inch blocks rather than the more sturdy and robust 6-inch standard variety - another alarming cost saving measure, as the 4 inch is used by Cape Development only on garden planters and the like - never for structural, as they are flimsier than the larger blocks, and the finished house would be far noisier, as the walls would be two inches thinner.
Our friend now is faced with continuing with a proved problem builder, or restarting and building his home correctly. Too bad, as a straightforward build has now developed into 4 months of stop-and-start headache, with a major question mark as to what their finished product would ultimately be built like.
The New New Math
A seasoned baja builder, who had done a number of projects here over the last 10 years, was shocked when, on his latest quote for a house just outside Cabo, his construction costs came in 45% higher than they had 3 years ago. He had been counting on the old costs being just a bit increased, but hadn't factored in the reality of a booming construction demand with a finite labor pool and rapidly increasing materials cost. So after planning his next few homes with an unrealistic cost assumption that made them pencil out as highly profitable, he is facing the issue of having to downsize their scale, and radically reduce his profit. That makes an insanely lucrative business into a merely great business, however it shows that even the old pros can get blindsided if they take their eye off the ball for a few years.
We Don Need No Steenkeeng Wood...
If you read our FAQ page, you'll find a recent account of our tour of a custom home built by one of the better-known companies in the area. Aside from the design deficiencies, there are a host of non-trivial materials and workmanship problems that are going to be shunted off on the ultimate unsuspecting owner. An example: most of the "wood" in the cabinetry is low-quality pressboard with a stained faux-wood finish, or worse - compressed foam with a veneer that looks like wood, and is hard to detect without a a very close inspection. What's the harm? After the home is sold and actual humans use it for a year or two, and a few summers of extreme heat take their toll, things are going to fall apart and degrade, left and right. It's like a movie set, designed to look good briefly on camera from a distance, but not built to last or be used in the real world. Someone's going to buy that house, and it almost surely is going to enjoy a litany of problems that a quality design-and-build team would have stopped cold. But the builder made fatter margins at the expense of the greater fool. Whether that is the buyer, or the client they built it for, is hard to distinguish. Either way, it's a nightmare waiting to happen, that's entirely due to cutting corners to save on costs.
What's a Year Or Two Between Friends?
Yet another client had worked with a reputable, ostensibly talented architect for several years on a plan for their dream home. After all that time, there was still a nagging feeling of disatisfaction that bugged the client, and when we were approached to build the home, conspicuous design flaws quickly surfaced. To make a long story short, the long process and poor efforts had misled the client into a thoroughly confused state, and that confusion had manifested as dissatisfaction with the plan. They didn't know what was wrong, but they knew something was.
We evaluated the design, and advised the client to start over. That was a tough call for them, due to the emotional investment and the amount of time spent. Once they were past that, and thinking clearly, we were able to turn a completely new design that was a dramatic and obvious improvement, in a week or two. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last, which is a shame. Clients deserve the absolutely best effort, every time. They often settle for mediocre, or worse. Which annoys us tremendously whenever we see it.
The moral of the story is that the eyes working on a client's behalf aren't all created equal, nor are the abilities of those putting ink to paper. This story ended happily, but many don't, and the results can be seen in the numerous monstrosities peppering the landscape. If you think something might be wrong, our advice is, get a second opinion. As with doctors, that is often sound advice.