Mitchell Homes

Use Mitchell Homes only if you want to deal with poor communication, abhorrent craftsmanship, and almost zero oversight or quality-control. We signed our initial agreement with Mitchell Homes in December, 2020 and closed on our house in January, 2022. Our experience with them from start to finish was extremely frustrating and we’re posting this review to help others more fully understand potential issues that they should be aware of if they decide to contract with Mitchell Homes, especially if their build site is not in the greater Richmond area. We repeatedly included the CEO on emails and invited him to our property to see the issues for himself. He never responded.
Poor communication:
We fully understood that to maintain the base price for our home, they had to break ground within 150 days of our signing the contract. We provided all floorplan changes within 21 days of signing the initial agreement. We then had to wait over 100 days for Mitchell to come back with initial plans and their pricing for these options for our consideration and then approval.
After the “Colors and Planning Meeting” where we made all final decisions on the house, there was another delay of 38 days before Mitchell Homes submitted the final plans and secured the County required building permit. During this time, we called the preconstruction manager multiple times regarding the status of the application and the cause of the delays. The answer was consistently that she was waiting for final plans to submit the application.
Due to these delays going over the 150-day limit, our salesperson informed us that they’d be increasing the base price for our home by $17,000 and would be deleting $12,000 worth of promotional discounts from our purchasing upgrades on the house. It took escalating the situation to the VP of Sales and our providing documentation on the delays by Mitchell Homes before we reached a “resolution,” in which we still lost $5,000.
Part of Mitchell Homes’ argument was that we had too many changes to the floorplan and that was causing the delay. Keep in mind that their definition of changes includes something as small as adding an additional outlet or a rough-in for a ceiling fan; or selecting one of the options listed on the floorplans like moving the laundry area. They should stop promoting themselves as a custom builder with customizable floorplans since they can’t adequately and efficiently handle any number of changes. In our case, we gave them all changes to the floorplans within 3 weeks of signing the initial agreement.
Another example of poor communication is related to the number of concrete block used in our foundation. During our Pre-Drywall Walkthrough, we balked at the number of extra blocks claimed to have been used. Our construction supervisor told us that an explanation of how the extra block was calculated would be provided at a later date. It never was provided. We again brought up the issue of the excess block count to our construction supervisor at our final walk-through. We pointed out that we could not come up with the count of an additional 571 concrete blocks (which we were charged for). We have photos of the foundation before the walls were constructed and can document 336 extra blocks. In addition, a pile of approximately 150 concrete blocks was left on our property. These blocks were piled up in front of where our well was to be drilled. We had to pay our excavator to move these left-over blocks to allow the drilling trucks access to the well site.
Our construction supervisor directed us to the VP of Customer Service regarding the issue. When we raised the issue with her, she directed us back to the construction supervisor. It wasn’t until 18 months after we had settled on the house until someone at Mitchell Homes even attempted to discuss the issue with us. Their Director of Construction (who had been hired only 6 months prior) reviewed paperwork from the construction supervisor. We shared the documentation of photos and counts with him. He couldn’t explain the difference and guessed that they had used 2 levels of block below ground instead of 1 level. Mitchell Homes has all clients sign an agreement that explains how they charge for extra block. That agreement stipulates that 1 level of block is beneath ground. We also shared that with the Director of Construction. In the end, we did not come to any sort of resolution. We still feel that we were overcharged by approximately $1,100 for the extra block and still have a large pile of unused blocks on our property that we had to pay $200 to move so that they weren’t blocking access to the well site.

Abhorrent craftsmanship:
We strongly believe that a contributing factor to the horrible workmanship done at our house was that the tradespeople had to travel 2+ hours to get here. Early on in the process, we asked if our location would be an issue, and our salesperson