Homevestors San Antonio - Lott's Alamo City Properties

Here's an experience that was a little less than perfect. Actually, dealing with Homevestors was less than enjoyable. My story about about our first home purchase is quite interesting. A local San Antonio Homevestors agent, Lott's Alamo City Properties was who sold us our first home. We love our house but will steer clear of Homevestors in the future. In a nutshell, Homevestors will find the lowest bidder to remodel a house. As we say, we share San Antonio with you "as we live it".

Homevestors - "We Buy Ugly Houses"

My wife found our home driving around one day and thought it had great potential to make a great home. It has been a great home but my hopes are that our experience with Homevestors was an exception rather than the rule.

My wife went to the first showing and absolutely loved the house. The realtor was an employee of Lott's Alamo City Properties (Homevestors agent) who seemed quite friendly and she brought her son along for the showing. I went to the second showing and as a first time home buyer, I didn't know what to look for. We went for a third showing and decided that we wanted to buy the house. This is where the trouble started...we had our own realtor for our representation, not with us at the time but we had already engaged her. Our contact with Lott's was the Homevestors girl and when she found out we had a realtor, she did her best to stall the deal. She said Mr. Lott would only deal through her if the house was to be sold. In other words, if we wanted to buy the house, we had to go through her. I called Mr. Lott, as did our realtor, and the deal was ultimately completed with our realty representative and Homevestors following some minor requests that Lott reluctantly complied with.

House bought. Now we own this place and we're so excited but here's what we discover:

No telephone lines, cords, outlets, no communication
Roof has three shades of shingles and dried tar drips on the side of the house
Cable TV wires have been ripped out of the house and outlets covered
Foundation was re-leveled but getting the warranty through a company that speaks only Spanish is quite challenging (new foundation information below)
Our back patio has since separated from our house
Dryer exhaust vent through the attic has been removed
Air conditioner vents in the attic are cracked and broken and an additional vent (we requested) to a bathroom proved worthless due to faulty air ducting. Attic is cooler than the house
One coat of paint was applied to the interior
Carpet joining strips has nails exposed
Wallpaper was painted over
Pink bathroom tile was painted white
Wallboard holes were covered and disguised with calk

In summary, Homevestors (and Lott's Alamo City Properties) puts a "band-aid" on a house just to flip it in short order and the service from this organization is sub-par and non-professional. To make matters worse, the crawl space in our attic makes for a tight fit but we needed phone and cabling installed (because Homevestors had ripped it out to expedite the house flipping). When the cable and phone people were in the attic, the duct work was further destroyed. I can't say Homevestors San Antonio franchisee did the damage but I can say they were the cause.

Maybe this was Homevestors first venture in our area. From the viewpoint of how a job needs to be done, Lott's Alamo City Properties, or Homevestors in San Antonio, could have done a better job. I've never sold a house to them so I'm not sure how they function on the opposite side of a business deal but I'm sure that I'll be a bit skeptical if Homevestors or Lott's Alamo City Properties is on either side of the table. We do love our house though, now that I've fixed it up. Homevestors - Lott's Alamo City Properties Photo Album

Updated House Information

Foundation Repair - During the first quarter of 2007 we noticed that the floor was not level in our living room and decided to pull up the carpet and have a look. Know that the foundation was leveled in 2003 before we bought the house. Actually, only part of the foundation was leveled. The part of the house that needed to be leveled the most was not even touched. Lott's Alamo City Properties and Homevestors only had the foundation company level the front and left side of the house. The heaviest part of the house, the rear and back patio slab are "separating" from the rest of the house slab leaving un-level floors and terrible cracks in the walls. We had another company come out to take a look at what could be done to fix the slab and re-level the foundation. They are actually the ones that pointed all of this out to us. Their estimate to fix the slab was $28,880. They pointed out that the slab was probably re-leveled only in the places that wall cracks were visible. In other words, Homevestors and Lott only wanted to fix the slab enough so that the house would sell ignoring any potential future foundation problems. The photo album has some pictures depicting our slab problems.