How To Hire an Architect and Builder in Boston (without losing your sanity…or your investment)
NEDC CLIENT JO-ANN MERHEB LEVY: HER STORY
“My name is Jo-Ann Merheb Levy. I live in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and I’m a Sales Director for a company called Insight Global, which does staffing and professional services.
My past experience has definitely been a fun one. We’ve been trying to redo our apartment for over five years now. We didn’t start working with NEDC until about a year ago, so you can imagine it’s been four years of us working with other types of design and architecture companies. My experience has always been the same in those situations—second we pay the down payment, they disappear, and we don’t hear from them.
We have to follow up a lot.
Being a salesperson, I know how to follow up and get what I want, and I’m super persistent and aggressive, so I had to take that tactic to even get a single response. Over those four years, we ended up with all these separate projects and pieces that we couldn’t really do anything with. It took so long from each one that, to me, we just wasted a lot of money.
It is night and day different with NEDC. It’s a completely different experience and one that I had hoped was the case.
I would complain to a lot of my peers just to see if anyone had any other solutions—maybe it was a me thing—but they all had the same experiences as well. I was very motivated to find a company that was not like that, and that is NEDC. It’s been the complete opposite of what I’ve experienced. They overcommunicate with me. I know exactly where they stand. They tell me what they need from me with very minimal effort and very minimal time. They actually listen to what I ask for and what I say, and you can see that as our relationship has progressed throughout the process.
I found them on Google.
I was being super persistent and motivated to find someone I could actually partner with and trust. NEDC was the only company that had a five-star rating with hundreds of ratings. I thought, “Who has five-star ratings? That does not exist.” Usually, I’m good with a 4.6! I read through all of them, and everything that everyone was saying was exactly what I was looking for—it was all my pain points solved. They overcommunicate, they’re not going to over- or underprice you and then upcharge you later or hide fees. They’re super honest, and that’s how I operate in my business, so that’s what I wanted in a partner. I reached out, and they responded immediately. That was a good sign right away!”
WHAT ADVANTAGE DO YOU SEE IN THE EXPERIENCE OF DESIGN BUILD?
I think the biggest advantage is that it’s all one place…
Like I was saying before, I’ve worked with a lot of different companies and I have all these ideas or architect like whatever it is that they give me. I don’t I don’t really understand that whole work—that’s not what I do. I couldn’t do anything with it because it was all separate and I that’s not my profession. So I don’t know how to take all those things that I’ve paid for and put them all together.
This and this situation it is all one place. So they’re taking okay the architecture of the place, okay now let’s design it like okay now let’s actually do the construction–they are doing all of that and I don’t have to reexplain what the person before then did that or retell them my image like they already know. So it’s just very very easy….and I’d say the biggest advantage is that it’s easy!
I’m very very excited about my design excited to see it all come together!”
NEDC Client Jo-Ann Merheb Levy. Boston, MA
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