An Ontario based Lawn Care company is defending allegations of negative billing.
Canadian Property Stars is a Direct Sales company which goes door-to-door selling lawn aerating packages.
They branched into Alberta a year ago and did 20 thousand homes.
One of those customers was Gord Copp and last week he says a worker with Property Stars showed up at his house to aerate his lawn again this year.
Copp says he told him he didn’t want his lawn done but the worker did it anyway.
“I went away for the day, I came home at night and there was a nice invoice for $78 including GST in my mailbox saying forward on to Canadian Property Stars.”
Company owner Ben Stewart says previous customers are supposed to be called and asked if they want their lawns aerated again but he blames clerical errors, lack of experience and miscommunication.
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“The worker was told in the morning, if you have a booking do the lawn. So there’s some form of communication plus the new staff member and if it was one of the first days (on the job). It is possible that could have happened. Again we apologize for that.”
The Better Business Bureau in Ottawa where the company is based says Property Stars has an F rating and 75 complaints in the past 3 years.
Owner Ben Stewart says many of those involved grass fertilizing and seeding and driveway sealing which the company no longer does.
However he says he has 200,000 customers in Canada and 70 complaints is a small ratio.
“If you look at these complaints you’ll see we’ve done everything we can to resolve them.”
The BBB reports all but 6 have been resolved but a report on the company says the, “Business has failed to resolve underlying causes of a pattern of complaints”.
The company owner says Gord Copp doesn’t have to pay his bill and adds there’s a money back guarantee for anyone else who has problems with their service.
The company has a City of Calgary business license and a Direct Sellers license with the Province.
Negative Option Billing is Illegal in Alberta.
See Tony’s blog for the definition.
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