Welwyn Building Company

Have reported to Trading Standards - please be warned to avoid! Come across really well initially and very polite on phone and during site visit for initial quote but this is only to get the contract and you trapped having made an initial payment! Very focussed on getting money upfront (and even before work is started and any materials ordered!). We refused to pay until we saw the materials delivered and even then only paid towards materials - alas, should have heeded this as an initial red flag as this was only the start of the issues. The company will then draw up an agreement to come across as being professional but this is worded very vaguely so please don't sign this. We actually deal with many properties and had ours rewritten by our in-house team hoping that a signed, agreed, detailed and clear contract would avoid issues down the line; unfortunately, that doesn't work with cowboy tradesmen. The workers themselves are a great bunch - it is the manager/company that are out to take shortcuts, not do the job and generally get money and leave before finishing the job. The manager himself (Sam) is very intimidating and patronising (even to people who likely have more experience in the general trade than himself!). From the start, they will start to tell you that the job is under-priced and they need now more money. Our quote was originally for 14 bays, he demanded money for 15 bays although only 13 were used in the end (no refund given of course but they kept the parts for the next job!). Next requests for money for extra posts (again, there were spare and we never received the refund), gate fittings which we had agreed from the start, fixing the neighbour's post which they had broken (and refused to put right!) etc - the list was endless! Even the audacity to request extra money to order the gates that we had agreed from the very start - we changed nothing from the original job briefing but mystery requests for additional money kept being made. BE VERY CAREFUL - will also repeatedly ask for the money before the job is done as a tactic to do a runner. Reported to Trading Standards and should be on Rogue Traders TV shows. Please be warned - he will try whatever means he can to scam you for extra money and take short cuts to save virtually a couple of quid. My family is in the property business and we spend thousands each year with tradespersons; this company is the most unprofessional we have encountered during 30 years in the housing trade. Not to be trusted with vulnerable people as they can easily manipulate and even those that are not vulnerable, he gets very argumentative when simply being told to perform actions as agreed in the written contract. E.g. at the end, when we pointed out that the job had not been completed to the agreed details and asked for a minor adjustment (perhaps 5 mins of work only), he became very aggressive, denied all knowledge and actually took out a sledgehammer and threatened to take a sledgehammer to existing work (and not pay back the substantial initial payment of course) if we didn't pay straightaway! Appalling behaviour - what kind of professional tradesman would do this?! Simply because it was 3 middle aged men vs 1 young woman. A series of other issues (but actually pales in comparison to the above of course!) include progress being ridiculously slow with the manager rarely present on site - a 1.5 day job took 7 days. Really bad tradesman for the simple job of a fence with two gates - feel a duty to raise a compliant to prevent other people being intimidated, getting bad work done, conned out of their money and a whole lot of stress. Lots of decent tradesmen out there - this company is not one of them regardless of how nice they try to come across at the start!
Jul 27th, 2020