Expert Tree Service

Dean and his son came yesterday and dug out and big old stump that’s been needing to come out for 5 years. He quoted me in person for free and came back a few days later, but it took him a bit longer than he thought. He didn’t complain or ask for more money. I’m so glad to have it gone and I didn’t have to do any of the work.

I used this business a couple years ago and they did a great job. When the time came to trim our trees again, naturally I called them first. The estimate this time was higher than expected. Much higher. Their estimator must have sensed this as he immediately offered lower prices to do less work. As one of the trees has reached critical mass I agreed to have that one trimmed for $ 775 (yes, you read that right). The trimmer was supposed to show up today. I called at 11AM to inquire when we might see someone. At 11:30 I was told they couldn’t make it today after all, how about tomorrow? I called back and left a message cancelling the job as I wasn’t keen on their pricing or the no-​show. Two hours later, I get a call saying they can come by today after all. I asked if he’d gotten my message (he had) and said I was no longer interested. He laughed, said «I hope your ego recovers» and hung up on me. The reviews on Unilocal indicate San Diego has lots of reasonable, polite tree trimmers. Use one of them instead — rude, unprofessional people don’t deserve to stay in business.

I called for an estimate and Dean was at our house giving us an estimate within hours. When he came, I explained to him that we were going to be putting our house on the market so we just wanted to clean things up and make it look nice. He said that some of the trees needed to be thinned out, but I told him that I did not want them thinned, just trimmed and shaped. He seemed to understand and said that was fine. He wrote up a contract that said Trim all trees. When the guys came to do the work, I looked out in the back to see one of our palm trees had been chopped! I told them not to do that to the other one. I called to ask if I could mail in a check for payment, but no one answered and then I asked the worker and he said that was fine. Later that afternoon, I got a call from a very irritated Dean that I hadn’t paid his worker. I tried to talk to him, but he barely spoke and then told me that he «forgot» the conversation that we had in the driveway about the trees??? He went on to tell me that I had to look at the wording in the contract so I told him that it said to «trim» the trees which is what I wanted and it is not what they did. He also told me that it was my responsibility to tell his workers what I wanted??? Isn’t that the whole point of an estimate, I asked him. He continued to be rude so I told him he had to speak with my husband about it. He called again the next day and was rude to me again. Then he spoke with my husband and was going to come out to look at the trees and just never showed. He finally came and gave us a discount which I don’t believe was enough, but I definitely would not recommend working with this company!!! They hacked our trees and Dean was not concerned at all with dealing with the situation!!!