We bought a pre-con home in their Kingmeadow development. Design center is a disaster. One of their people, Nicole, was so incompetent she accidentally sent us their subcontractor pricing in an excel sheet which showed Minto marks up all of their subcontractors by 100%!!! Unreal... Something that should cost 300 bucks gets marked up by the sub to 600 and then Minto marks it up to 1200. So you pay 300% markup.... fantastic.
Construction was decent when it comes to the structure. A lot of the finishes are garbage though. When we moved into our house we still had incomplete work. We did A LOT of upgrades on the main floor so we seemed to have gotten slightly better quality than our neighbors. They screwed up a bunch of our changes so they had to fix them.
Our 30 day Tarion submission had over 100 items on it... took months upon months to rectify. They had to rip out our entire staircase, redo our pocket doors multiple times (ended up giving us a cash settlement for 50% on the pocket doors which was their markup... LOL). They eventually had to have 3 guys come to our house for 3 days to fix a million nail pops on our trim cuz they used the wrong gauge of nails when installing.
Their master care should be renamed to "Dont Care". Every issue had to get escalated to the next level to be resolved (sometimes we even had to go to their VP!).
Luckily my friend is a contractor so he fixed a lot of the crap for me. We also did a lot of contractor upgrades after the fact at a fraction of what the builder wanted to charge.
When we bought the home the market was hot so they didnt even give me a broker commission even though I'm a real estate broker. Now they are trying to sell their next project at Ivy Ridge and are paying 2.5% cuz no one will buy their homes, not just because they are a pain to deal with, but because their prices are also way above market value. They are even offering $120k in incentives and people still wont buy. When the going is good they treat you like garbage. Then when the market is slow they try to kiss your behind. I know I definitely wont be buying one.
Be smart, don't buy a preconstruction home from Minto unless you want a MASSIVE HEADACHE.
