Mattamy Fairwinds Phase Five

Evening everyone.  First off let me say sorry for taking so long to get to this post but believe it or not 11pm this evening is the first opportunity I have had to do a little writing since last Wednesday’s meeting with Mattamy.

Before I dive into the meeting I want to repeat something and make it very clear.  I have never had any problem with Mattamy as a builder or Frank Cairo as a person. We created this blog and media attention to bring attention to what we believed was the very poor level of communication coming from Mattamy in general.  I cannot really blame Mattamy for doing a poor job as the situation was not something that was the norm for them or any other builder for that matter.  However, that does not excuse the way they went about providing accurate and frequent updates of information to the consumer.  Let me repeat this if it is not clear for some of you complainers out there.  Our problem was with the communication not with our homes or the planning process as a whole.  Perhaps Mattamy will learn from this experience and if in the same situation again will realize they should set up a web site or email distribution list or some means of communicating everything that is going on.  Even if the update is nothing more than ‘we met with the city today’ etc but at least something.  Public Relations 101 Mattamy, manage the message or be left with some ‘prick’ like me writing it for you and as you have probably learned that is not a good thing to happen.

So a little about the meeting.  Well first off congratulations for stepping up and calling it in the first place.  You went through the motions and did a fairly good job of explaining yourself. If there was any fault in the meeting it would be your consistent perception that we do not understand the situation or that it is to complex. A couple of 100K is an amazing incentive to learn the details of an issue.  Other than that you did a bang up job and fielded a lot of questions from home buyers that where difficult to answer.  You were also honest with regards to guaranteeing future closing dates by saying ‘no there is no guarantee’.

So some of the details of the meeting and the news.  First and foremost Mattamy has been informed by the 3^rd party EA review, the engineering firm I assume, that the miscalculations found in the original EA do NOT impact on phase 5.  This means that there is no EA or engineering reason for phase 5 not to go ahead with construction.  Given this result Mattamy is now pushing ahead with its own engineering assessment, yes including the interim storm overflow pond on the Hortichuck lands, ahead within the framework of the city and the city planning office.  Given that they are technically free of the EA from an engineering standpoint one can only hope that the city will fast track its acceptance of their proposal and that the Ministry of the Environment will to.  I have a feeling they will move it to the top of the heap before certain phase 5 buyers start calling, writing and emailing them with regards to any delay, just a thought!

Interestingly and I believe in the name of building up some trust, Mattamy has offered a 5K bonus if you sign the new contract by October 31^st.  The 5K is cash back on taking ownership of the house so amounts to a discount on the price of you house.  I would like to point out that unlike the other options offered by Mattamy which we and our ‘Neighborhood in a Kitchen’ group asked for this option was never asked for. This option was solely Mattamy and I think is a very nice gesture and personally very much appreciated. 

So if you missed the meeting and have not been contacted by Mattamy, get on the phone and call the sales office to get more details.  Of note the new contract is under the new Tarion rules I believe.

So a couple of thoughts to close with.  One, it may surprise you to learn that during the meeting I was not frothing at the mouth and asking hard hitting questions.  In fact the only time I raised my hand was to try and clarify what was already said in a positive way as I believe Mattamy had met all the requirements we set out to get and holding the meeting went beyond them.  So I went to the meeting thinking ‘give them a break and be constructive as they now deserve it’ and that is exactly what I did.

Secondly, where do we go from here with this blog?  Well that is an interesting question I have been asking myself for a week now.  Since we intend to sign the contract and Mattamy has met all the requirements we asked for plus more there is not much more to say or write.  We started this blog on behalf of all our future neighbors not ourselves.  Although there are some folks out there who thought we were doing the 15 minutes of fame gig that was honestly not our intent. In fact these past 8 weeks have been incredibly stressful on both me and my wife. It kept us up late many a night worrying if we were doing the right thing, what to say, how to say it, in what medium and when. Hell I hate getting up early in the morning yet I dragged my sorry butt down to CBC Radio for 7am then actually had to sound coherent. You would not believe me if I told you how nervous I was sitting in that chair for 10 minutes. I guess for us this has been a very difficult and time consuming experience we wish we never would have had to do in the first place.

So now we are moving past this and are going to try and move back to being just another consumer.  Don’t worry Mattamy if there is an issue with my house then that is between you and me not the rest of the world.

We do however plan on creating the web site AnHonestClosingDate.com.  The domain is registered and I have a provider.  But technically it is very difficult site to implement to ensure that people are being honest and are not just simply pissed at their builder for a delay. So from an engineering stand point there is a lot of work ahead for me to ensure that it is fair.  The idea for the site is NOT to penalize developers but rather to point out how the planning process is failing the consumer and the developer as well.  As Mr. Cairo said to me it can be years to get to even the draft approval stage.  I think that is ridiculous to say the least.  All that time amounts to cost that has to be transferred to the purchaser.  One of the commentators on this site has complained about us being upset over our ‘expensive’ homes when there is a huge lack of subsidized homes in Ontario. He/She/It is right, since they signed it anonymous with a bogus email address.  The state of subsidized homes in Ontario is disgusting and we as a society should be ashamed.  However let’s remember that even subsidized housing has to go through the exact same planning process and the costs associated with it.  So our hope is to gather the delays as evidence of how it fails the consumer, since it is the consumer who votes and also to create a working group of field experts.  We want a working group of developers, environmentalists, planners, engineers everybody who is part of that process to start putting their melons together and go to the province and say ‘hey enough, we have a better way and it represents everyone from the builder down to the consumer!’  We need smart people like Frank Cairo and Ted Cooper to start putting that wealth of information down into better and new ideas on how to make things better for everyone instead of spending energy wading through the existing system in frustration.

 So I guess that is about it for now.  I will have some short updates tomorrow and later in the week, in particular a couple who need to sell there Mattamy home in Barhaven and asked me to write it up.  I will get to it folks I promise.

Best wishes to everyone and see you at the BBQ in 2010.

Cheers
Keith, Danielle, Colyn and Ashton Chadwick