Taeho Um & Associates

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WATCH OUT - Not Trustworthy

I am extremely dissatisfied with my experience working with Taeho. I feel like I was taken advantage of by being given incomplete information, backed into a corner, and then forced to pay an exorbitant site visit fee that was never discussed or agreed to previously. I am left with the impression that Taeho's only concern in projects of this type is to try to extract as much money from each client as possible, rather than finding ways to add value to the project while receiving fair compensation for his work.

I engaged with Taeho to provide structural engineering support on a set of improvements I am making to my deck. After going back and forth via email, providing photos of the area to be improved and the existing plans we had for the building, he delivered a proposal for the work to design and deliver structural specifications for these improvements, to obtain the necessary permits, and to hand-off these documents to my contractor to execute the work. Based on this, I indicated we'd like to move forward with the proposal and we scheduled a time for him to come out and take final measurements.

During this visit, he shared the fact that this process would likely take 3-4 months to complete. My plan was to start this work in approximately one month, so this was a major revelation to me and significantly impacted my plans. I immediately called my contractor to discuss the situation and requested a few days to review this new information and decide on the best path to move forward. Taeho indicated that in light of this, I would need to pay a $600 site visit fee that would only be reimbursed if I decided to move forward. This too caught me off guard, but he was unwilling to leave without receiving this payment and was unwilling to reduce the cost of this payment in light of his failure to provide all relevant information necessary for me to make an informed decision prior to the visit.

Upon following up on this after he left, I confirmed that he never mentioned any site visit fee in his initial proposal or any documentation he shared leading up to the visit, nor did he provide any indication of the expected time frame for the project. I contacted him after the fact to share this insight and ask for a partial refund of the site visit fee in light of this, recognizing that while he was partially to blame for the circumstances we found ourselves in, there were also steps I could have taken to have prevented this and a reasonable site visit fee ($100 - $200) was not an unreasonable request on his part. The response I received was an offer of a $33.33 refund, which he calculated by including $100 worth of time that he spent crafting this very email response. By that logic, if he had just spent a bit more time on the email reply, he could have charged me an additional $66.66 instead of offering me any refund at all. Based on his hourly rate of, the site visit fee amounted to 3 hours worth of time for a meeting that lasted around 30 minutes. All of this struck me as nothing short of ridiculous but Taeho was completely unwilling to work together to find a suitable resolution to this issue.