Francisco Tavares Inc

Francisco Tavares Inc. has been building and maintaining Cape Cod landscapes since 1951, when its founder started the company in East Falmouth; his son Gary is described on the company's own site as the current hands-on owner-operator, and BBB's records show a change in ownership in 2020 with roughly 90 employees today. The work spans full landscape construction, site development and excavation — grading, retaining walls, patios, stonework and septic systems — for Falmouth, the rest of Cape Cod, the Boston/Metro-West area and Rhode Island. The company's trade credentials are unusually deep for a business this size: BuildZoom scores it 96 out of 100 against 11 permitted projects on file, mostly septic installs, retaining walls and residential renovations around Falmouth and Woods Hole, and its current Massachusetts Home Improvement Contractor registration (#176468) shows as active on BuildZoom's listing, with an older registration number retired. BBB rates the business A+, and Houzz notes it's been featured in Landscape Architecture, Coastal Living, Cape Cod Home, Veranda, Town and Country and Boston Home. There's no customer review history yet on Houzz or BuildZoom, and Google shows only a handful of ratings, so most of what's known comes from the trade side rather than homeowners describing a specific job. The one piece of organic word of mouth is telling, though: in a July 2026 Reddit thread, a fence contractor who works alongside them on Cape Cod jobs called their work nice — the kind of peer endorsement that's harder to fake than a star rating. One thing worth noting before calling: the company's own site gives two different figures for how long it's been operating — "over 58 years" in one spot and "75 years" in another — the latter lines up with the 1951 founding BBB records, so it looks like an unrefreshed line on the website rather than anything more concerning.