Jonathan Spayde, the owner of Landfare, has been sentenced to 366 days in federal prison for tax fraud. I am now also hearing from subcontractors about Landfare’s shady dealings with them. Namely, Landfare allegedly doesn’t pay their bills. Likely not a coincidence, Landfare offers no lien indemnification in their standard contract terms. If Landfare doesn’t pay a sub, that sub could put a lien on your property. Do you want to take that risk? I have reached out to a few of these folks and I hope they’ll write some guest spots or give me more information. It seems John had more shady dealings going on then just stealing from his business and the IRS.
Back to the story at hand. John was ordered to report to prison on October 16, 2018. He has since claimed a hardship case. He was granted an extension to report to the FCI Ashland facility on January 15 with no further extensions allowed. You can read the granted motion here.
Protip!
As I have mentioned before, I am now working with a contractor who I adore. Two of the standard terms in their contract are called ACCOUNTING RECORDS and LIENS. These two sections of the contract protect me as the consumer.
ACCOUNTING RECORDS states that I have the right to request and inspect any receipts, books, correspondence, etc. related to my project. I can see and verify they actually bought the nails they said they did. Conversely, Landfare was never able to produce receipts for me and hoped I was satisfied with pictures of other materials that weren’t used on my site. How they thought that was acceptable accountability I’ll never know. (Here’s a picture of some nails we used on another project – we might have used something similar on your project). Seemingly they did indeed have something to hide and it caught up with them.
LIENS states that so long as I pay my bill, the contractors will indemnify me of any mechanics liens. This means, if they don’t pay a sub, if that sub puts a lien on my property, the contractor is on the hook to make the lien go away.
Protect yourself. Get these sorts of things in writing from your contractor.
Landfare offered no such protections and it could well have come back to bite me as I learn more about their shady dealings. Happily, the subs they were stiffing had the integrity to not go after the homeowner. However, not all subs are like this as I learned the hard way in about 2001. This is when another unscrupulous contractor didn’t pay a sub and I ended up with an $800 mechanics lean on my home. That was a lot of time and effort wasted to have to get the lien forgiven.
Landfare – not worth the risk.