Black Oak Canyon

I’m going to start from the beginning so anyone looking to hire this contractor knows their MO!. First don’t hire Black Oak Canyon, Inc. (BOCI) for any work! My husband and I ended up contacting BOCI through the Nelson Homes website www.nelson-homes.com whereby they provided a dealer representative in the USA. When we first met Dennis Reynolds, May of 2022, he was very professional and provided an understanding of building our dream home. The contract was signed and work started in June of 2023. Work continued slow and BOCI had issues with getting subcontractors to our work site due to the distance of the remote location. Things took a turn for the worse when he fired the framing company and had to recontract with another subcontractor. The house framing was completed, windows went in and roof was installed. We then received our first lien from the framing company he fired and never paid. A second lien was received from the roofing vendor for non payment, all of this happening around July 2024. We reached out to BOCI multiple times to get this corrected but they kept noting they were in a financial conflict with another law suit they had pending for another project that went south and that they could not pay their subcontractors even though we paid BOCI. To date, we have windows that were incorrectly installed and siding that was incorrectly installed and BOCI will not pick up the phone or reach out to correct any of these problems. It will ultimately be on us to fix them without any type of contract offset for their screwed up services. We are also out the cost of the siding, drywall and insulation that was part of the contract but we ended up paying for it because they did not have funds. If you look at the timeline, this company has taken a deep path of deception and fraud intentionally as noted by Jodi A.’s comments from 07/05/2024. It should be good lesson learned, never pay a contractor directly. Make the check payable to the prime and subcontractor so you don’t get screwed! The other option is to pay for services once they are completed. I hope this review helps those on the fence and please make sure to note, if you find BOCI via the Nelson homes website, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not use this company!

To preface this review, this project is our 9th major remodel over a 35 year span, so we are seasoned home remodelers having worked with general contractors on both lump sum and time and material contracts and in several counties and states. We love collaborating with contractors and home remodelers!

Full stop, BOCI should not be in the business of general contracting. Their project management is abysmal, communications extremely poor, budget management either nefarious or incompetent. They front-loaded invoicing to the extent that major sums of money were paid in advance of protracted (many months) timelines, delays and incomplete work. The back office partner was incredibly demeaning and far from “customer friendly”. Invoices were frequently inaccurate, double billing on top of their 21% project fees, and utter confusion around their “accounting” procedures. We believed we signed a lump sum contract with 9 progress payments to be made according to pre-specified milestones and an allowance budget. However, we would randomly receive “change orders” along with an invoice that did not align with the budget allowance, nor was pre-specified and agreed to by both parties as law dictates. They would DEMAND PAYMENT within 48 hours by cashiers check or bank wire and threaten to stop the project if payment was not received on demand. Whenever we raised questions or even asked for alignment meetings or calls, we were met with aggressive talking down to us. There was one interaction where the contract went into a fit of rage, yelled at me, threw his arms up and stormed off the project after I asked about the timing of a part of the project that had been paid for three months earlier and essentially not started. While they asserted their demand to adhere to their “policies and procedures”, they actually never followed them. For example, there was supposed to be a monthly budget reconciliation and time to completion update. However, we received this only twice in the 10 months after signing the contract in July 2023 and terminating them at the end of May. On the other hand, they would send invoices and change orders without warning with demands for payment within 48 hours by wire or cashiers check but not provide the requested details and accounting to justify whether these changes fell within the contracted budget or not (which they often did fall within allowance).

We take some responsibility for trusting this contractor having relied on BuildZooms 5.0 rating and our initial interview when we engaged Mr. Reynolds. On second look, the 5.0 was only based on a couple examples of ‘delivering a proposal’, not regarding actual work done or customer testimonials. (Yet their website touts bogus 5 star reviews)! We write this review only to help future customers avoid the pain and disappointment we have experienced. BTW this project is a renovation/remodel of a 900 SF barn to become and ADU. It is still not completed and has been a year since we engaged.

After we terminated our contract, the subs started reaching out with lien notices- so far, more than $30k in unpaid sub invoices are outstanding, despite the fact that BOCI was paid by us. This is aggregators and outrageous as these subs earnestly did their work.

In summary we would not recommend BOCI for any project, large or small. Dennis is a passionate builder, but neither he nor his partner can run a business.

To buildzoom- I cannot believe the score you have provided for this contractor- based on our experience it makes that value of these ratings and scores useless.. Shame on me for relying on it!