Bad Experience with Project Management & Communication

Our Body Corporate contracted Genesis Construction to route water from a gutter downpipe to a surface drain. The work involved laying a PVC drainage channel through an existing tiled pathway directly in front of a lobby access gate. After the initial site inspection, trustees received a comprehensive quote. Based on this and positive online reviews, trustees approved the quote for the drain work and paid substantial deposits for this - as also for a second maintenance project involving the replacement of damaged soffits to be carried out afterwards.

However, once work commenced we had to deal with several annoying issues. Genesis Constructions’s focus appeared to be on another larger project and the necessary staff and tools were not made available for the project. Genesis kept on delaying the commencement date and after eventually arriving on site, the project manager decided to make a detour to buy some items saying he would return shortly but took hours.

Genesis did not provide a sufficiently long extension cord to connect to our complex’s power supply and would later claim an additional R699 for purchasing a longer extension lead when in fact one of the trustees had to lend him her own cord to extend the short lead provided. The workers were supp**** with a puny 115mm angle grinder to cut through the thick slate path tiles and made extremely slow progress. The specs were clear in that reclaimed and/or spare tiles would be used to edge the drain but instead we got a messy concrete edging with no consultation. The project manager later claimed that he could not cut the tiles thin enough! Excavation of the channel loosened one of the paving tiles which he refused to fix. Instead of deepening the drain from the path to the outfall he laid a pipe, falsely claiming that there was insufficient fall. Instead of taking the promised two days to complete the job, it in fact took 4 days due to the lack of project supervision and frequent down times - and the rubble took over a week to collect and then then only after much prompting. The last straw was when a trustee was confronted by angry workers on the last day when they demanded to be paid or threatened to remain on the property until this was settled. When urgently contacted to resolve this internal matter, Genesis refused to appear on site to sort this out claiming that the workers knew that they would get paid when the work was signed off. The trustee concerned was fortunately able to remain calm and reason with the workers and after some time they eventually left the property.

After committing to inspecting and signing off the drain project (as stipulated in the contract), Genesis was a no-show on the agreed day and time without explanation, and our multiple calls and messages were not responded to, the result being that snags could not be flagged and rectified as pledged in the contract. Genesis did not subsequently offer another date for the sign off. We then cancelled the soffit replacement job given our dismal experience with this contractor.

While the balance of payment for the drain work could reasonably have been withheld until the sign-off was done and problems resolved, Genesis Construction, to our horror, simply proceeded to unilaterally deduct full payment for the drain project (adding in the supposed cost for an extension cord) from the total of all our deposits leaving only a small refund. Given Genesis’ unresponsiveness to our communications, the trustees and our portfolio manager finally gave up trying to negotiate with this company and, left with no choice, were compelled to engage another contractor at extra cost to make good the multiple defects of the job.

A zero rating to this company if it were possible.