Terrible Experience with Abodu – Do Not Trust Their Promises
I regret ever signing a contract with Abodu. From the very beginning, I was promised that my ADU would be completed within 6-8 months and that the cost would not exceed the initial estimate. They assured me that their site visit was thorough and designed to prevent any surprises during construction. However, after two long years, my home was finally installed—but in the wrong location!
Abodu has completely bait-and-switched me. Their sales practices and advertising are misleading and do not align with the reality after you sign the contract. They make grand promises, but once you're locked in, it’s a different story.
This is a very unethical company that takes advantage of people. I would strongly advise anyone considering them to look elsewhere. Don't fall for their empty promises like I did.
MR
Matt R.
Run as far away as possible
Run as far away as possible. We're in month fourteen of what was promised to be a six month install of an Abodu studio. Factory delays. Construction delays. Permit delays. Delays because their employees just went on vacation. We've had multiple project managers. Unexpected additional expenses. A portapotty in our front yard for five months. It takes weeks to get a clear answer on anything. And there's no end in sight. It's a good looking house, but in our experience, Abodu has no idea how to put it in your yard on time and on budget.
UPDATE, responding to Abodu's reply: I can't believe I'm getting a response to my bad review before I get a response to my questions about our ongoing project, but here we are. That said, I appreciate the sympathy. Everyone at Abodu has been sympathetic when I can actually get in touch with them. But at every step, the company as a whole has followed up on that sympathy with additional missed deadlines.
My review is not based on a single failure, but on a consistent chain of failures and poor communication about where the project is at. In month 14 of a 6 month project, I should be hearing from Abodu every week about what's being done. I even said as much, multiple times, to no avail. I don't care that the General Manager has "been in touch with me." He has. He's nice! I care what he's doing, and this week I have no idea. Everyone at Abodu seems to think that telling me, "We're giving this our highest level of attention" is a comforting sentence without any need for elaboration, and at this point in the project, it's not. Because we've been hearing that phrase since last November, and the project has only been delayed further.
I went with Abodu because I saw a lot of good reviews of the company coming out of Northern California. But simply put, Abodu has been incapable of delivering our Los Angeles home on anything close to their promised deadline, and is now more responsive to my bad reviews than to my questions about our ongoing project.
And to your sign off, "if there's anything else we can do to address your concerns," yes, there is! We have multiple unanswered messages (written, I will grant you, with increasing levels of frustration and anger) in your app, right now. And further back in the app, at least three specific issues your team was going to "get back to us on." This is still such a fixable problem, outside of permit delays. Communicate. Do the things you say you're going to do, instead of paying lip service and then going radio silent and then explaining you have "hundreds of projects."
Response from abodu.comJul 9, 2023
We're really sorry about the extensive delays, poor communication, and overall negative experience you had with Abodu. We totally get how frustrating it must have been. We fully acknowledge our mistakes, and are committed to making it right.
For context - some of the issues you mentioned were driven by team members or vendors that are no longer employed by Abodu. Over the past 6 months, we’ve restructured our team and removed some vendors who didn’t meet our expectations of quality and customer service in order to learn from situations like yours.
Across the hundreds of Abodu ADUs we’ve delivered, we’re proud of our reputation for delivering high-quality, well-designed ADUs with industry-leading customer satisfaction. But that’s completely irrelevant because we’ve dropped the ball here. We’re disappointed that we haven’t been able to meet your expectations, or, frankly, our own on this project. The experience you described is not acceptable, and not what any customer of ours should expect, whatsoever.
We won’t shy away from the fact that scaling to keep up with unprecedented demand has been difficult, and there have been some growing pains over the past few years - as illustrated by your examples. At this stage, we feel like those growing pains are behind us, and we’ve worked out the kinks.
Our General Manager and Vice President of Operations have already been in contact with you, and are doing everything in their power to expedite the process of getting you your keys as fast as possible. We truly want to ensure we resolve this issue to the best of our ability.
Again- we're really sorry for all the inconveniences and frustrations you've faced throughout this project. We genuinely hope to have the chance to make things right and earn back your trust in Abodu. If there's anything else we can do to address your concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us directly.
Thank you,
Abodu
