MY TOLL EXPERIENCE













"Toll is to luxury housing what McDonalds is to salads." -- Curbed Commentator

I’m sure you’ve seen Toll Brothers’ ads – the ones that claim Toll Brothers is the largest builder of “luxury” homes in the country, and that Toll Brothers builds “quality by design.” You may even have visited Toll Brothers’ website and read Bob Toll’s assertions that Toll Brothers provides excellent customer service and has a 95% satisfaction rating.

If you believe all of this, please take a long, hard look at the contents of this website. I believed it all, and as a result, went on to make the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life: I bought new construction from Toll Brothers.

I ended up with a house that is so seriously flawed, both structurally and cosmetically, that virtually every builder and structural engineer who has examined it – with the exception of those induced by Toll Brothers to say otherwise – has expressed the opinion that it would be simpler and more cost-effective to tear the house down and rebuild it than it would be to repair it. It is so seriously flawed that Judge Patrick DeAlmeida, the Presiding Judge of the Tax Court of New Jersey, has assessed the value of my house – which should be in excess of $800,000 even in today’s soft real estate market – at $25,000, the amount he estimates it will bring for salvage. (See Judge DeAlmeida’s report.)

The house is so seriously flawed that one of Toll’s own attorneys remarked, while at the house, to an engineer hired by Toll to inspect the house, that this house embodied the “worst construction” that he [the attorney] had ever seen. (The attorney was once a builder.) The engineer agreed. Apparently neither of these men realized that both my attorney and a builder who was here to inspect the house on my behalf would overhear the entire exchange.

Amazingly, Toll Brothers has acknowledged many of the serious problems with this house, in writing – but despite a very costly legal battle that has gone on for eleven years, they have steadfastly refused to fix them. Instead, they have tried every legal maneuver in the book to make the lawsuit so lengthy and costly that I have no choice but to give up and go away. They have done everything they can think of to avoid being held accountable in any way – something they appear to be doing to homeowners in every state in which they build.

“Quality?” “Luxury?” “Customer Service?”