The Building Group Inc

The Building Group has represented the Union Park Loft Condominium Association since the Association was formed.  I have been President of the Association for almost two years and have been an owner for more than ten years. All of my dealings with the Building Group, both as an owner as well as President have been entirely satisfactory and I would recommend them without reservation.

Jerome L. Schulman, M.D.

We use The Building Group as our management company at my condo and they are awful.  Their follow-up on any condo issues are terrible, if you want to get any questions answered it's like dealing with the Keystone cops, they don't return phone calls and no one knows who to talk to or what has to be done, not to mention that they treat owners as an interruption of their work. I was once told that they don't work for me they work for the board (guess they don't realize the board represents owners) anyways I would stay far away.

I am on the condo board and we were looking for new building management. We decided against them. The pricing was good and fair. They were friendly and punctual. Their presentation was very good.

The Building Group came highly recommended by one of unit owners (who subsequently left). Jim Stoller and Louis Parenti came to our Board and gave us an extremely polished and smooth presentation complete with glossy brouchures, charts and a claim of the newest and latest computer technowlogy. Although they were slightly more expensive than several other management companies we interviewed, our Board was impressed by the presentation and we contracted with them for services. From the start things did not go well. Intially they placed a property manager with us who was completely unfamiliar with the operation of a coop and who lacked the required personality and temperment to effectively manage a building. This building manager was pulled and i believe terminated a short time later, Over the next 2 1/2 years we had 3 other building mangers placed at our building. Not only did this make the intial transition dificult, but we had to reeducate each and every manager on building related issues. In my tenure on the board at this time i don't recall either Jim Stoller of Louis Parenti, the folks who pitched their services ever returning to our building. It was a classic overselling and bait and switch. Over the next three years of their involvment our building became increasingly dissatisfied and distrustful of their services. They unreasonably delayed the reciept of our real estate tax refunds to our shareholders and they were often slow to respond to building complaints. In one case it led to unessarily paying for expensive boiler repairs. Although some of their contractor choices were reasonable, they constantly pushed high end contractors and vendors who were more expensive than bids we obtained on our own. They further pushed through a roofing project through one of their vendors without stressing that we needed to repair the parapets before putting on a new roof. Thus we put a new roof on bad parapets leading to extensive water damage in some units. This happened under the watch of Ceorge Criel, a roofing consultant who was "strongly" reccomended by the building group but allowed the good roof to be put on the bad parapets. We ended our relationship with the building group recently due to a total breach of fiduciary duty. Because of the roof leaks we recognized we needed to work on the parpaets. The building group brough in several contractors who submitted bids in the $400-$500 thousand dollar range. We were suspicious of this because these contractors told us that we needed to redo essentially the whole building allthough we knew that within the last 10 years we had done an extensive replacement of lintels and tuckpointing. They further recommended in the interim that we put up building wide scaffolding to prevent debris from falling from the roof because a small amount of adhesive with motar had blown off in a bad rain storm. When we refused to pay $25,000.00 for "emergency" scaffolding they breached any fiduciary duty to our building by notifying the City of Chicago Department of Buildings that our parapets were in a dangerous and hazardous condition when that was simply not the case. The lack of a dangerous and hazardous condition was confirmed by Frank of AAA Masonary who is highly rated on Angies List and who is in the process of doing the masonary work at a much more reasonable price. Likewise we are now using Genki Management Company (also rated by Angies List) whose services have been a breath of fresh air.