RYAN HOMES INC

The design phase project was a failure.
 
Ryan Homes was paid $5000  to steer a home remodel design towards a pre-defined budget and generate a detailed cost of construction bid. 

The construction bid, based on the Ryan Homes expert input to architectural plans, missed the pre-determined $250-300K budget by over $100K.   Ryan would likely argue the miss was much lower as the bid was loaded with what they consider "options".

In addition to the $5000 consulting fee paid to Ryan Homes, we spent many more thousands more directly to a Ryan Homes recommend architect who completed the budget busting architectural designs and plans.  The architect (independent partner of Ryan) has thankfully come back to the table to help us recoup what we can on revised designs. 
 
We did find Ryan Homes to be professional.  They were knowledgable, attentive, responsive and punctual.  The bid appeared comprehensive, clear and a fair representation of the plans.  The problem is the plans did not track anywhere near the budget, which is precisely what Ryan Homes was paid to do.

In retrospect, Ryan Homes' expert consulting and budget steerage service was poor quality.

Our expectation of good quality service would have been to either (a) steer the designs within 10% of budget as verbally discussed or (b) stop the project, before spending more architectural design dollars, once it became clear the budget or our requirements were unrealistic.