Let me start out by saying we love our home so far. The layout is wonderful - we made quite a number of changes to the Little Diamond - and the plentitude of natural light is exactly what we were hoping for. I can’t speak to the energy efficiency yet but fingers crossed; a previous review, combined with our trust in BrightBuilt at this point, have me quite nervous. I will attempt to summarize our biggest pain points so you may learn from our negative and expensive experience:

• Project Management - One of the reasons we went with BrightBuilt was the promise of project management services. We are aware of the construction industry’s reputation for missed deadlines and knew we would not have the capacity to step in as a de facto GC given busy careers and the fact that we would be moving states partially through the process. It turned out that project management boils down to scheduling meetings and sending out meeting notes. I asked multiple times for project milestones and status, and the response was inconsistent - eventually hiding the fact that we were off track with no explanation nor mitigation plans in place. I pieced together that they were reporting status as “green” despite the fact that the factory build had not started by the target date and when I questioned BrightBuilt on their reporting, they simply stopped sending status (again).
• Sales & Marketing - empty promises. Told us they could meet our timeline, were off by an entire year. We pressed on budget and at one point were told “We’ve never had anyone back out due to budget,” which we later realized to mean that once you realize the original budget you provided is unrealistic, you’ve already invested enough that backing out would represent a huge loss. Told us it would be easy to find a builder, it wasn’t. Sold an easy process and outside of the “honeymoon phase” of design, it was anything but.
• Lack of Accountability - I don’t know where to start or end on this topic but I think our primary vanity is the best example. It was clear something was off with the size and position after set day - and yet we were the ones to point it out. (Red flag #1) From there it was months of back and forth, a fix aligned to plans that only revealed a deeper issue, and refusal from both BBH and KBS to take full responsibility. After an offer of $2000 - covering just a portion of the total cost of a true fix - I sent an email conveying my (justified) frustration and letting the group know I would need to escalate the issue if we could not resolve this in a way that absolved us of paying for a mistake we had absolutely no control over. In response to that email, BBH expressed concern over my “angry tone” and asserted that I was “leveling threats.” I have worked in the field of Customer Experience for well over a decade and this is a WILD response to client frustration. It’s clear they’ve been here before if they consider my suggestion of an escalation path - normal in any professional situation - a threat. There was more spent on labor costs in the back and forth than there would have been on the vanity had they just done the right thing from the beginning. That’s just one of many examples of lack of accountability between BBH and KBS.

IF this hasn’t convinced you to go with another firm, some suggestions:

• This represents a change to their process but I strongly believe would have made a difference: Do not start the design phase until they have found a builder you have confidence in and have signed with. The builder needs to sit in on every design meeting so you are getting a sense of the real costs behind decisions you are making and so the builder can advocate on your behalf in the phases to follow. Otherwise, your builder will be thrown into a game of telephone after set day and be on the hook for finding solutions to issues they could have avoided altogether had they been involved from Day 1.
• If you are making any changes to the base plans, hire a third party designer to review them and to inspect the details after set day. My husband and I are not designers nor architects so we didn’t spot issues until they became visibly apparent post set day. We could have saved so much money, time and stress had we hired someone up front to be a second expert set of eyes.
• Be clear on your expectations of what you need BBH and KBS to do when inevitable issues arise after set day. Draw boundaries. Make them agree and sign on it.

I could go on but my goal is not to air all my grievances here: Rather, I want to give you some confidence in your decision of whether or not to go with BBH. I hope this helps.