Audio Video Design Inc — Local services in Mission Viejo

(first post april/ may 2018) Horrific and a complete scam. The system breaks down at least once a month( More commonly twice a month) and they come back in and "fix it" and then charge you every time. There seems to be a new problem consistently, which seems to be how their business model works. They send in a tech to work in your home all day and then half the time the system is worse off after they leave. Thus, we have to call them again and then, in turn, they can charge us more for their techs to come "fix it" again. A complete joke. In the past year, this company has come to my house at least 20-30 times and charged us every time. There is no solution in sight and we are about ready to cut ties and just accept our extreme losses( Yes, extreme, as our system cost 100,000 to install and I can only imagine what the weekly bills of sending technicians out here have added up to) FOR YOUR OWN SAKE AND PEACE OF MIND DO NOT TO USE THIS COMPANY!!

Update (written 02/20/19) In response to the owner replying to my review. The charges for monthly maintenance only ceased once we had complained to the company about how ridiculous it was for them to come out every month to fix a broken system( I did check on the charges). Your own employee admitted to us that this system and the work you had done was embarrassing and I quote "not our best work." It has been 10 months since I first wrote a review and not much has changed. I will admit that the visits to fix things have been less frequent but there is also the aspect of us just giving up on certain things working. It now seems that when there is an issue, the solution we repeatedly hear is you need to upgrade to a new/ better system or version, which in other words is a new way for you to charge us for maintenance. There are simple things that we hear this for. For example, controlling a simple light in a room that used to work which now does not and over the past several visits you have made, all we hear is the only way to fix it is to get a new system because there is no way to fix it. This claim has no merit as the control over these lights used to work just fine with the current system we have. I don't normally write reviews but I have no other way of getting through to this company. Again, even your own employee very recently said "there is nothing I can do to get through to [the owner(I left out the name for obvious reasons)], I have repeatedly informed him of your guys' issues and he does not listen, I guess the best thing to do would be to yell at [owner] until he finally listens to you." Your own employee agrees that this is absurd. The past few days have been awful, for no reason at all, some of the heating systems in the house are on full blast, which makes it impossible to sleep and obviously rakes up our electricity bills for the month. Today we finally got you to show at the house and now one heating system is fixed but two others are now having the same problem. It is currently 78 degrees in the upstairs area and we are not sure what to do. A simple answer to these problems could easily just be better due diligence and proper customer care. I will continue to update these posts until Audio Video Design steps up to the plate and or we, as previously stated, just give up and...

This is one of the worst businesses I’ve ever dealt with. They are untrustworthy crooks. Nothing they installed ever worked properly. They had to come out numerous times to try to fix ongoing issues. Eventually, the entire system just broke down...and I had to hire professionals to come replace the AVD system. The company I hired told me that AVD did a horrible job and that they tried to hard code things to prevent anybody else from ever being able to service the equipment.

Worse than all of that...I paid them over $100,00 per the proposal they sent. After all of the work was completed, they came back and tried to say I owed another $25,000. This made no sense as they never did work without being paid first. They also couldn’t produce any evidence that I actually owed the money. They then put a mechanics lien on the property to make sure they got the money they didn’t deserve when I sold the property.

These people are crooks. I would recommend steering clear. They are so bad that I was compelled to write a review, which I have never done in my life. Just horrible people to do business with. I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to them. Horrible!

Addendum....a new development further underscores what an unscrupulous business this is: a potential buyer of the house I have for sale contacted the company and asked for a copy of the purchase order for the products I bought - and they just gave away my personal information to complete strangers.

Note that much of their business is cultivated through general contractors. I would strongly suggest not working with any contractor who conducts business with this shady company...as they would most likely be...

I found AVD online and wrote a message to them on there website. They responded to me next day. Ashely was extremely polite and asked me a little more about what my system issue was. I told her I had a wiring problem and that I needed someone to come out and fix the problem. She told me that they were booked but she would see what they could do to squeeze me in somewhere. Two days later I got a text from Ashley stating that a technician finished a job early and would be able to get to my home. The technician showed up when Ashley said he would and he was able to diagnose the problem, get it fixed and didn’t overcharge me. I highly recommend these guys. The technician was great and Ashely from the office has amazing communication skills. If you need AV work done, AVD are the...