Signature Pools and Landscapes

Oct 2023

Hands down the worst experience with a contractor we've ever had. Eric Watanabe, owner of Signature Landscape and Pools is dishonest, unorganized and could care less about you. The highlights are: -He intentionally underbids then gives you change orders for the dozens of things he doesn't include -He's incapable of sticking to any kind of timeline he gives you -He's unorganized, causing delays in the project -Charged us for services not rendered which we had to fight him on later -Left our pool totally unsafe for our family to use and refused to complete the work to make it safe -Didn't pay his subs (but paid himself), gave them our personal information so they could threaten to put a lien on our home -His secretary, Monica Nava is rude, sarcastic, inept and entitled -Eric is a BS artist that spends much of his time bragging about how great he is, but he is not a man of values -Don't take our word for it, search this company AND Majestic Pools and Landscapes and believe the reviews The Details, buckle up, it's a lot.... there were even more issues, but there's a character limit here. We hired Eric Watanabe and Signature Landscape and Pools to renovate our entire yard including our pool, hardscape, and landscaping. Eric took a sizable sum of money and didn't break ground on the project for about two more months. His contract was nebulous, was missing about 50% of the work needed to keep the bid low and entice us to sign it. He claimed the only items not included were about four lines of highlighted expenses. After four months of slow work, we realized he was running about 60% over budget and had not included many items discussed, some on the plans. He would submit change orders and blamed his egregious spending of our money on a gas line repair, which was a FRACTION of the expenses he racked up in change orders. After 4 budget meetings, we were never able to get a full accounting of the cost to finish the project. He would show up unprepared, but all smiles, with items and costs "off the top of his head" instead of a full list of total costs. He always seemed more interested in socializing, bragging about how amazing he was. He was consistently unprepared/unorganized. We asked him for landscaping plans for months and he said, "oh, no that's later." When later arrived and we were supposed to be planting, he showed up with a hand drawn plotting of trees and nothing else. The contract stated he would provide CAD drawings that we never received, just more last minute hand sketched plans. When we asked for a refund of the thousands he charged for the CAD we never received, his rude secretary, Monica Nava, said this: "Is interesting that other clients haven't said anything knowing [their employee] had [been ill]" inferring that the extra money was going to his medical which was not true. While we have the deepest sympathy for their employee, it doesn't excuse them charging us for services not rendered -and essentially admitting they were ripping off all the rest of their clients the same way! And let's talk about Monica for a minute. She was rude, sarcastic, and ignored our requests for copies of the contract, invoices and other items. But when they wanted payment, she would email and text us multiple times per day for immediate pick up. We also have a mismatched spa to our pool because of him. Because he was so behind timeline and so over the budget, we ended up having to fire him from half the project, agreeing to finish the pool and hardscape with him. Eric was absent the entire last two weeks of the project and we never saw him again. He sent us an email claiming he was retiring (we know he has two other projects in the permitting phase, he's not retiring). He did not finish the last piece of agreed upon work, leaving our pool totally unsafe for our family to swim in and refused to come back to fix it to the "commercial grade anti-slip" he promised. We are still trying to get our pool to work properly due to other i