Thank you for choosing one of Leisure Villas’ premiere retirement communities.
By this point, you are either living in one of our amazing homes for active adults, or you are about to move in and are reading this article to know how things work once you are here.
As always, we strive to build the best house we possibly can. Home construction however will occasionally have flaws or errors. Most of these are basic and easily corrected, but it does help to understand how the process works.
Getting Something Fixed
Expectations
First, managing expectations is an important part of home ownership. We pride ourselves on being Utah’s best builder for senior communities. We know that you want to retire into a home that is low maintenance and well suited to your lifestyle.
We do a great job at creating such communities, but we can’t negate all home-owner responsibilities. For instance, there’s obvious maintenance like replacing old light bulbs or smoke alarm batteries that we don’t do for you. Nor are we going to vacuum your carpets each week and replace your furnace filters every two months after you move in.
But there are other issues that may arise that don’t seem so cut and dry. For instance, the weather stripping on your door. This stuff eventually rubs off. Sometimes after some of the veins are gone, others still keep the weather out, but other times, it and needs replacing.
Also, it’s good to keep in mind, that there are industry standards for construction quality. We pride ourselves on exceeding many of these standards, and we do our best to accommodate marginal requests, but occasionally we may draw the line when a request becomes completely unreasonable.
When to make a request
Generally there are three main times that a fix request should be made.
First: Pre-settlement Inspection.
The pre-settlement inspection, also called a walk-through, should be done before a home is closed on and occupied. This is a time when the builder can show you through your home and explain all the different features and how to work them.
This is also an opportune time for you to see the home and discover any items that you feel are not up to industry standards. We’re always striving to have few to no items that need fixing at this stage. We spend several days before these walkthroughs, touching them up and getting them ready to occupy, but occasionally we miss something, and if you find something, we’ll do everything in our power to get it fixed before you move in, though sometimes, this isn’t possible right away. In those rare instances, we consider the problem to be a warranty issue, and we’ll finish it as soon as possible after you’ve moved in.
Second: 14 Day Callback.
Ideally, once you’ve moved in, you should be able to enjoy your excellent new home. However, at this time, you might notice something that you and we missed during your initial walk-through. Not a problem. Let us know, we’ll be happy to fix it for you as soon as possible.
Third: One Year Callback
Here it is, the final warranty callback. By this time, you’ve lived in your home for a full year, and if there was any last minor things that have been bothering you that you, that didn’t get taken care of in the first two callbacks, this is the time to get them done, or forever hold your peace. We recommend letting us know within the last 14 days before your warranty expires.
We usually ask that you request warranties during these three main periods, this last one being important, because your warranty ends after this time, but also because if you wait till the one-year mark, your house will have finished settling as much as it is likely to. This means that any extra screws popping through sheetrock will be evident, and any other things that can fail or that were installed incorrectly will have presented themselves by now.
Most warranty requests made outside of these three main callback periods are usually considered a lower priority, since most anything major will have already been caught by the first two request periods. Thus we can’t always jump on every little thing in between, since we have other priorities that are more pressing. Besides, a lot of time is expended every time we have to do any warranty request, so if we can lump all of them together as often as possible, we are able to work much more efficiently.
If however you have a real serious problem, such as a water leak or your furnace stops working in the middle of the Winter, by all means, we’ll jump on that right away.
If you have any questions about what is or is not included in your warranty, feel free to ask one of our sales representatives. If they don’t have the answer for you, they can quickly find it.
How to submit a warranty claim
There are two main ways that we prefer warranty claims to be submitted. The first is via our online portal. At this time, that portal is maintained by BuilderTrend, a software that you will get a log-in and password to once you close. This log-in can be accessed through our website.
The other way you can submit a warranty request is to visit with our sales staff. During construction, and while we’re still selling homes in your community, we will maintain a sales staff dedicated to your neighborhood. Whenever you submit a request through them, please do so, preferable in type, since they will mostly be entering it into our BuilderTrend tracking software for you.
We discourage you from calling in your requests, unless it is an emergency, and we discourage you from stopping our construction team on site to discuss your warranty. This is because they are usually very busy, and while they will ultimately be in charge of getting any work performed, they don’t have time to visit with everyone everyday.
Thank you
We are very glad that you chose to buy a home in one of the top 55+ communities in Utah, built by Utah’s best builder of retirement homes. We sincerely hope you enjoy your home, and that everything we mentioned here makes sense.
If your experience is anything like the nearly 2000 other satisfied homeowners we’ve worked with in the past, then we expect that you too will agree that this will be the best move you ever made.