TopNotch Homes, LLC

Seven Google ratings averaging 3.3 is a strange number for a homebuilder, and the split behind it is the story: people who bought a TopNotch house either write warmly about the process or allege they were taken. The company builds new single-family homes and adult-community neighbourhoods around New England from 290 Broadway in Methuen, and also looks for land to develop. Its BBB page names Michael Wakeen as owner and Shane Wakeen as manager, with one employee on file, and records the LLC as incorporated in September 2003. The company's own site describes itself as rooted in Salem, N.H. and trusted for over 25 years. The building history is real and it is mostly houses: 23 permits, largely new single-family construction in Methuen and Tewksbury, with renovation work in Dracut and Tewksbury. The warm accounts line up with that. In September 2025 a buyer wrote that Stephen walked them through the homes, delivery and financing options without pressure; two May 2024 reviewers cited professionalism and deadlines met, one of them naming Shane; and in a 2020 BuildZoom review, someone who had lived in three of his new homes rated the construction highly. The other half is specific and serious. An April 2023 Google reviewer called him an unprofessional house builder who picks poor-quality materials, described stress and headaches working with him, and told readers not to do business with the company. In 2019, a BuildZoom reviewer who put the purchase at $592,000 wrote about cut corners, cheap incentives, broken promises and a refusal to take responsibility for fixing issues, and urged the next buyer to triple-check the purchase and sale agreement and get every description in writing. Both accounts are years old — but they are the only detailed accounts of the actual construction anyone has left, and the newer positive reviews describe the buying experience more than the finished house. Two things to settle before you sign. First, licensing: BuildZoom says the owner's Massachusetts general contractor licence, #CS-028630, expired on 09-29-2021 and was still inactive when it last checked in July 2026 — that is BuildZoom's own claim rather than a state-registry check, and it is a number held by Michael Wakeen personally, not by the LLC, so confirm the current standing with the state yourself. Second, take the 2019 reviewer's advice on its face and put specifications, materials and the punch-list obligation in the contract in writing. This is a small builder with two decades of permitted houses behind it and a genuinely divided customer history. For a new build at this price, the references worth chasing are the ones from finished homes a few years on — not from the sales conversation.