Competition Irrigation & Lawn

They come once a week.  Sometimes they come on a Monday or on a Tuesday and are not consistent with the time that they come.  They told me that they would mow, weed as well as blow the concrete after they were done if there was any grass on it but did not blow it.  Their price is good and I assume they are cheap as they do not do much work.  I would use them again only till I find someone else.

The Competition Landscaping (Sal) appeared to be a big scam.  Vista Del Valle 3 hired them to perform irragation service, landscaping and ground maintenance (hence their name) and all they did was mow the grass.  He (Sal, the owner I would imagine) worded the contract as such so he could charge extra for irrigation and other services. 

When they reseeded the grass they missed 4, 4'x60' strips of grass and it was sooooo noticeable.  I told Sal about it and he said, "yeah it's no big deal, we will take care of that when we do our "spot seeding."  I knew that wasn't possible because it was already too cold for anymore seed to be planted. 

Vista Del Valle 3 contracted with them for 4 x 1 yr contracts.  By the 4th year (2011-2012) they pretty much ignored our concerns of their complacency. The HOA board addressed our concerns with Sal (The Competition) for about a year, and he ignored them.  We told him that we were going to put the contract up for bid this year (because of his work) and that he was more than welcome to re-bid the contract, and he did.  Sal re-submitted a copy of their bid from the previous year, but hand-wrote an inflated price for his service.  That looked professional.  Needless to say the HOA Board chose another vendor. 

The Competition would seldom clean up after themselves, leaving foliage and debris all over the grass and sidewalks.  It got so bad that some of the townhouse owners went out and cleaned up their mess because they simply refused to do it.

The last day of his contract, 15 Jan 2012, he and his crew (who are highly disrespectful) completely butchered our Ficus trees.  There are still some trees that are completely bare, some with random wirery branches sticking out and others that have huge (10'x10'x10') squares taken out of the side of trees, all thanks to Sal's (what seems to be) malicious sculptures.  I addressed Sal about it and his response was, "well we did as much as we could!  If you guys didn't fire us then we would have finished!"  The

Competition charges double for routine work (like sprinkler head replacements).   The Competition's contract expired we began looking into their invoices.  It appeared that they charged us for parts and labor, but didn't actual replace the parts and furthermore perform the labor.  We even went as far as having other experts in the landscaping and irrigation line of work, look at what he charged us for, and they even said that a frightening amount of work we were invoiced for, was never performed.  Whenever we were invoiced for sprinkler repairs we were charged an additional $30/hr --that, by the way, was on top of their regular wage we paid them.  For instance, their normal working hours were from 0800-1400; lets say that we paid them $100.00/hr between those hours.  If Sal did a sprinkler head replacement within those hours, he would charge us the normal $100.00/hr + an additional $30.00/hr.  We never understood that.  That's like hiring someone to replace your sprinklers for $30/hr, but if during that contracted time they had to replace any sprinklers, they would charge you additional $30/hr. 

That confirmed my opinion of Sal and the Competition Irrigation & Lawn.