RECENT REVIEWS
Show All ReviewsWoodlands of Dover, January 2021
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Things were going very well with building our home until they put in the well. We approved plans for the well head to be located at the side of the house. Due to a mix-up on the builder's part, they put the well head right in the front of the home. When we complained about it, we were told that the well contractor couldn't get his truck up the hill to put it on the side of the home. We did not want to walk out to a two feet high well head in front of our house. Korndoerfer suggested that we get a fake rock or do some landscaping to cover it up. Long story short, we had to hire an attorney to enforce the original contract and get the well head moved to the side of the home. This put a damper on our entire experience and the lack of customer service on Korndoerfer's part regarding the well placement was very disappointing.
Scattered Lot, January 2021
Liked Most
Overall the home is great. We built this house with basically 0 compromises as our dream house to get exactly what we wanted. We were happy with the custom design agreement that Korndoerfer agreed to put in place for us. If Wolf didn't agree to that, we would have built with Victory most likely and would have paid 20% more for the same house. So for this we are extremely grateful. We were happy with the design process - Lora helped come up with some amazing structural changes that got us where we needed the house to be. The overall build quality and workmanship, in my opinion, was very good. We were at the build site every single day without fail, so we were able to see every little thing that happened each day. Building a house is of course expensive, and certainly in our case where there are basically no compromises on budget, I want to be sure that I'm getting what I paid for. For us, as our home, there is a feeling of confidence that the house will last. It's easier for me to detail what went wrong because that's a finite list - if I listed out everything in this section about what went right, it would take me 4 hours because it's easier to just say we are overall overwhelmingly happy that we built with Korndoerfer and the overall state of the house. The biggest thing above everything else that was good is that for 98% of the issues, Korndoerfer made it right. We had a ton of things we caught that were done wrong during rough mechanicals, and to be honest if we hadn't have been at the house every day, our final product would not be perfect as we spec'd it. There were outlets in the wrong place, light switches missing or wrong, light fixture plates in the wrong spot, heck even the tub deck for our master bathroom tub was built as a drop-in instead of undermount, and we had specifically on the plans that it was to be undermount. There were lots of little things along the way, and everything got taken care of. We are forever appreciative to Tony for his diligence on everything - he's so busy that it's hard to get ahold of him, but what we learned very quickly was that anything at all that we ever messaged him about, was read and put into action. I never had to worry about if something would get done or not, even if I didn't hear from him for a week. The house is overall amazing. Everyone who comes in is blown away by how beautiful everything is. For us it's hard to believe we came to a spot in life where we could enjoy a house built to this level of quality. My overall rating for Korndoerfer would be an A-
Would Change
The basic paint package should be better. It's not just my house but neighbor houses built by Korndoerfer have the same problem - 1 coat of paint, and cheap paint at that - literally rubs off the wall entirely with the lightest scuff or if you try to clean it with a rag at all. At minimum Korndoerfer should include 2 coats of paint as standard. The base price of my house was 293,000 and we spent 450,000 in upgrades/customization. I'm pretty sure there was margin in there to allow for 2 coats of basic paint. Selections did not tell us at all about options on the fireplace like a remote control or fan control. I ended up paying a 3rd party for that after we moved in. Selections did not tell us that municipal codes require standard address numbers to be tacked onto the house, but we were sold an address stone. Our understanding was we would just have the address stone, and then we come to find out that we have the stone, and 5' above it we have the same thing duplicated as black/white address number blocks screwed into our window trim. It looks stupid and I took down the address numbers immediately after occupancy. Selections did not tell us that we could get color-matching vents for our wood floor, so we have medium stain wood floors with these stark white vents, and now I have to call Floortec after the fact to try to order something to put in myself. Korndoerfer is a volume builder, so selections tries to get you in and out as quickly as possible - we had to request a 2nd selections meeting and that was very helpful, but I think that should just be a standard. Most people going in will be overwhelmed in 3-4 hours, and you need some time to digest, and then refine. The fill we received for the rough grade was the worst I have seen in my life by far - the amount of large rocks we are going to have to pay to remove is enormous for landscaping, more annoyingly, the rough grade on the entire back half of our house is basically to the real grade instead of 8" below, so I may as well have paid for topsoil at that point. Now I have to pay my landscaper to remove a bunch of garbage dirt filled with rocks that we don't need. On June 2nd I was told by Brian that it was going to cost an extra $6000 for our foundation due to needing to dig deeper for soil conditions. He said it would take 3 weeks or so for that to come through, and yet it was never reconciled until end of November when Maria did final recon. Because Brian set the expectation, and I never saw any bill come through, I assumed they didn't actually need to dig that extra depth like they were thinking. So not only did I get slammed with an extra $6k at the end of our build, there was an extra $2500 on top of that for extra rock on our driveway (also due to soil conditions) that I was never told about. That whole process should be more smooth and transparent. We paid a lot of money to get CAT-6 cable run in the house, but the electricians told us Korndoerfer doesn't pay them to terminate the cables, so the cables were hooked to outlets throughout the house, and all of those cables came back to a hub that we had planned out - well the 8 cables coming into that hub were not terminated, meaning nothing could be tested. This is garbage in my opinion and completely unacceptable. I had to crimp the CAT-6 myself, and test it with my own equipment, only to find that the electricians screwed up 2 of the outlets where they didn't pin the cables correctly, and the worst of all is that the master cable that was supposed to run from our internet modem in the basement up into the hub for our router, was actually run to our master bedroom CAT-6 outlet....the only way to fix this will be to cut into drywall....who is going to pay for that? Korndoerfer wipes their hands of the house after giving me an incomplete product that isn't even tested. I have the owner of Allianz coming over tomorrow (january 21) to look at everything with me and come up with a game plan. I shouldn't have to do this though. The fact that I had to pay like $120 per outlet or something insane for cat-6 cable to Korndoerfer, and the cables don't even get terminated/tested to guarantee the work, is just infuriating to me. Especially considering I'm paying you for a literally $750k build not including the land. If I had gone to Espire or Victory (i had Espire price a similar house out) it would have been a 900k build all day....and I can't get my CAT-6 cable properly installed? The touch-up painters rushed, didn't do a great job, literally used the wrong paint on our walls in the master bedroom, left open buckets of paint on our wood floor with no plastic under them or anything, and as a result Tony had to deploy Chris to come in and try to clean all that up. In my opinion, Chris had to do way more than he should have had to because of cleaners not doing a great job, painters not doing a great job, touchups on the stain for the wood was pretty bad too. I mean the stairs have white casing but a wood stained base, so if you're going to touch up either of those (the stain was super thin on the sides), you have to tape off the trim. No one did that, so then there was stain on the white. So then they put white touchup on the trim, but didn't tape the base so guess what? Now the stained wood has white paint on it. I mean for crying out loud it should be incredibly simple we're talking about a 5' long section that's maybe 3/8" thick. You can't take the time to just do it right? I eventually had to just say "please stop, we will take care of it ourselves". The stacked stone we paid for in our master bathroom accent wall is filthy because whoever installed it was sloppy with the adhesive, and there was still plenty of drywall dust in the air, so combine those two and our black stacked stone has all kinds of streaks and honestly kinda still looks like a construction site. Korndoerfer said they cleaned it as best they could, so now I have to find some alternative. I paid thousands of dollars for that stone and it should look good, not filthy and discolored. People need to take their time and do a higher quality job with the finishes. Most contractors were very good, but there were some misses here and that's what I'm taking issue with. I rated value for the home for price paid pretty low not because we don't value the house ourselves - for our family it's great. We don't plan to move so whatever, water under the bridge, but including the land, my lot/home package with Korndoerfer was $880,000 before 20k in discounts, and I have had two appraisals now for $700k. Part of it is the cost to build keeps going up, but generally speaking I can safely say I lost $150,000 building this house, literally. I just wanted to clarify that the house we got is what we expected, but the low rating I gave on value for price paid could be interpreted in different ways.
BUILDER PROFILE
Korndoerfer Homes
175 N Corporate Dr Suite 130
Brookfield, WI
53045
262-884-9550
Since 1926, Korndoerfer has been respected as one of Wisconsin’s finest builders. We offer a wide range of home opportunities, providing uncompromising attention to architectural details with our diverse collection of plans. We guarantee each customer will experience the professionalism and quality we have built our name on, resulting in a beautiful new home and an enjoyable home building experience. We are committed to creating fine family homes designed to last a lifetime, and you will find our dedication reflected in each home we build.