5 Star Cleaning

Formerly five star rug and carpet cleaning & 24/7 Flood Emergency
Fire & Water Damage Restoration
Richmond Hill ON L4B 2C8
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HomeStars  >  House & Apartment Cleaning in Toronto  >  5 Star Cleaning  >  Horrible Experience: $2000+ in damages to property
Jakub
Jakub
4 reviews Toronto, ON
0/10

Horrible Experience: $2000+ in damages to property

I had hired this company to do a spring cleaning of my house based on the generally positive reviews on this website. This was a massive mistake, I don't know how this company received such reviews, let alone is still in business.

To summarize the story: this company cause $2000+ in damages as a result of their cleaning, and would not reply to any communication (by phone or email) after the cleaning.

The problems started before the cleaners first arrived, which should have been a warning sign for me. They arrive more than one hour after their stated time, first one man with no supplies who requested to use my bathroom "to change" and approximately 30 minutes a woman with some very basic supplies (ie: buckets, cleaning sprays, and a simple vacuum). They in fact asked to use my vacuum to aid in the cleaning.

With the cleaning, there are two major issues, firstly, in cleaning the master bathroom, your cleaner literally took the handheld bath wand and sprayed the entire area of the floor with a flood of water. This water leaked down onto the room below, as can be seen in the attached images. I don't know what standard of residential cleaning includes showering an entire bathroom floor with water. Not only did it cause damages to the room below, but also caused damages to the baseboards in the bathroom itself. I had my contractor assess and repair these damages, and his assessment was that these were directly caused by excessive water use in the master bathroom.

Secondly, my computer monitor is Dell Ultrasharp U2711, it is a $1500 monitor (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ2978260). Looking at the job the cleaners did on the day of cleaning, I noticed multiple scratches on the screen, including a thick central scratch. Images of this are attached.

I'm sorely disappointed and frankly angered by this service. I have to this day not received a single word of communication from them after multiple attempts. I completely regret dealing with this service and hope that in outlining my experience, at least I can help prevent anyone else from losing their valuable time, money, and going through the heartache for dealing with this unprofessional, destructive service.

Edit: July 3rd, 2016

I finally received contact form the owner, and the experience somehow managed to get worse.

I was contacted by this company only AFTER I had posted the complaint. Instead of discussing coming to a possible resolution, the only thing the owner was concerned about was removing the feedback. When I asked why he didn’t respond previously, to both email and sending him texts directly, to which he previously was very quick to reply, he accused me of not sending any texts. Once I sent him the email and screenshots of the original texts, he refused to talk further, only telling me to take down the feedback. Screenshots of this unbelievable conversation are attached.

The story only continues to get worse. When I refused to take down the feedback until we came to a resolution (which until that point represented my experience with the company accurately), the company DENIED THAT I HAD DONE ANY BUSINESS WITH THEM to homestars, challenging the feedback! As soon as I sent proof that they had taken money from my credit card (without any of my approval) showing that I had done business with them, the feedback was once again posted.

This horrendous customer service, lack of professionalism and frank fraudulent censorship of any negative feedback needs to be seen and addressed. Companies cannot be allowed to behave in this despicable manner.

I now can understand a possible reason for this falsely high rating for a company like this. Instead of addressing customer concerns, this company censors feedback. Needless to say, we have not come to any resolution thus far. I sincerely hope that anyone seeing this may avoid a very costly mistake in both time and money by hiring this company and look elsewhere.

Edit: March 12th, 2017

I was on Homestars once again looking for other services when I came upon the response from this company to my review.

It is hard for me to believe that people like this exist and are still in business. Almost everything in the response is false! Firstly, as mentioned above, the cleaners arrived late, I had called once 30 minutes after they were due to arrive after receiving no response to texts, and told them to CANCEL the appointment since they were already so behind and were not responding. I remember the owner convincing me to stay with them after pleading for many minutes on the phone, making excuses for their lateness and saying that they are on their way and will be there soon. This was exactly the opposite of what they say transpired.

Secondly, I hired this company specifically, in their response they admit to sub-contracting the work. I was not informed of this, in fact had no idea until I read their response below. When I am hiring a company, I expect that that is the one that will do the work based on reviews, NOT a sub-contractor who I did not approve.

Third, they state there was no communication until the job until the feedback. On this they are correct, only by virtue that THEY didn't response until I posted the feedback. I tried multiple times to get in touch in various ways with this company, and as I say above, only until the feedback was posted did they respond.

Finally, all the details about payments and reimbursements is utter nonsense. They refuse to talk about reimbursement at all until I took down this review. Until this day I haven't seen a single penny for the damages sustained for their horrendous work. It is more important for me at this point to keep this review up so that customers like myself, who depend on homestars will know who they're dealing with and will look elsewhere.

Also note how many of their reviews "do not meet homestars criteria" and are taken down. In my experience, as I mentioned above, I had to SEND IN MY CREDIT CARD STATEMENTS TO HOMESTARS TO PROVE I HAD PAID THEM in order to keep this review up. I can imagine many others who write accurately negative reviews of this awful company have them taken down as well. Do not trust this company, take your hard earned money elsewhere, never to people like this.

Approximate cost of services:
$450.00
What could this company do to improve their services?
Any advice to offer fellow homeowners facing a similar project?
11 of 15 people found this review helpful.
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Company Response

We was surprised and upset to read this review. We take customer satisfaction very seriously and when the supervisor left this job the client was happy.
We'd like to address some of the points about this job, firstly you called few times on a Saturday June 4 ,2016, and insisting to have your house be cleaned on next day which was a Sunday, however we said we do not have anyone available but you kept calling so Bob thought you were in desperate need and wanted to help so we tried our best in such a short notice to provide you with services, so we had to get help from a fellow contractor to clean your home which we have used them many times and have had excellent results and satisfaction from our customers. Then as in any case something unexpected happen and there was a slight delay in getting there, which was communicated well and accepted by Jakub. Lastly There was no further communication in regards to the job until the feedback. In conclusion, our customer satisfaction is important to us, although we strongly believe we did not do these damages, we were still willing to negotiate and give him back the $250 for the contractor he claims he paid and $400 for the monitor replacement but he is not willing to accept it and insist that we pay him $2000 for the damages. We do apologize that he feels this way but unfortunately it does not look like we will come to a resolutions so unfortunately we will just have to move on and focus on our loyal customers.