When a Good Stay Turns Bad

 We really enjoyed our first week at the Full Circle Ranch....and then the owners, Jim and Lisa Steffen, arrived. It was downhill from there.

I had booked this place with a 50% deposit for a stay from November 1 to January 31. When I booked the place, I checked out the reviews and website. What I didn't know was that all the reviews were for the previous owners. Jim and Lisa purchased the property in 2019 for around $940,00, with a 20% down. It was a well regarded B&B and horse motel. Apparently, the previous owners, having run the business for more than two decades, were getting divorced and needed to sell. 

Jim is a financial planner in Anoka, Minnesota - a small town of about 20,000 people. I can't imagine there are a lot of people in Anoka requiring a financial planner, but whatever. Jim makes in the low six figures and Lisa is a stay at home mom and trophy wife. Their home in Anoka is worth about $400K and they still owe about $100K on it.

Neither of them have any experience or training in the hospitality business. I have no idea what possessed them to purchase a B&B that is worth twice as much as their home in Minnesota with zero experience running a bed and breakfast.

Regardless, the B&B part of the property is beautiful and I really liked the ambience.

About two months prior to our arrival, Jim called me up and told me that they had decided to stop operating as a B&B and switch over to renting over the entire house as a single unit. We could still stay there, but if there were any paying guests staying in the house, we couldn't use the common areas. I figured with COVID-19 there wouldn't be a lot of paying guests. He said he and his family planned to stay there some of the time we were there and during those times we could use the common areas.

When Jim arrived, he insisted we pay him the entire amount due for the rest of our stay. I asked if we would still be able to use the common areas as long as there were no paying guests in the house and he said, yes.

The next day (now that he had all our money), he said we were no longer allowed in the common areas whenever anyone was in the house - including his family and any friends they may allow to use the property for free. Well, you see where this is going. We complained loudly that this is not what we agreed to and this certainly was not what we were paying for. He said he was charging the same amount as the previous owners. We were paying $1000/month for the RV site and $600 for the spaces for the horses. 

The previous owners provided stall cleaning and free bedding for horses. The previous owners allowed people in the RV site access to the common areas - and they were even allowed inside the house to use those common areas, including the kitchen. So, basically they wanted the same amount of money as the previous owners without providing the same amenities.

There are no laundromats within 30 miles of this place, so there is a small stacked washer and dryer unit in the common area. We were told when we arrived that we could use the laundry area and this was an amenity included in what we were paying.

A few days later (as we continued to badger the owner to either provide a partial refund or let us use the common areas) we were told we could no longer use the washer and dryer.

I was also told that it bothered Lisa when I was talking outside on the phone (the reception is really poor inside the trailer due to interference from the trailer), so we needed to stay inside the trailer except when we were taking care of the horses.

Instead of sitting by the pool, we were told we could sit here. This is the area used by the property manager. The property manager smokes, so we were paying $1000/month to share a smoking area with an employee.

The owner put a padlock on the gate so we could no longer access the laundry room or any of the rest of the property.

The shrubs and cactus at the RV site was so overgrown we had to risk getting scraped to get to our vehicles.

This was the view from the front of the trailer. I spent an hour clearing out cactus because I was tired of getting pricked.

We started looking for an exit. The owner refused to give us a refund and we had given him more than five thousand dollars, but we were not going to spend the next three months being miserable. Every day he was figuring out different ways to harass us. 

We figured that the only way to get our money back was to harass him and if necessary we would have to sue him in court. That's when I looked at Jim's finances and realized that it was highly unlikely he had the money on hand to refund our rent.

Meanwhile we also started searching for a new place to go. We wanted to stay in the outer Phoenix area, so Ari could still see his sister and nieces, so that limited our choices.

I posted on the Road Apple Gang Facebook group (a group for horse people who live in their trailers full-time) to let them know what was going on.

I got dozens of recommendations of places to stay. I narrowed it down to three places and we went to check them out. After our experience with Jim, we didn't want to get caught by surprise again.

Jim called the sheriff on us complaining we were trespassing because we were trying to access the common areas. We explained to the sheriff what had happened. The sheriff called Jim and told him to refund our money so we could leave.

We found a private barn about 90 minutes from Cave Creek in San Tan Valley for $650/month. There is no pool or hot tub here, but since we weren't being allowed to use the pool and hot tub at Full Circle Ranch, we weren't really downgrading.

The horses are sharing this large space - yes, all that space for the two horses and they have some shade.

Our RV site is now cactus and shrubbery free. 

Jim refunded us $4,000 of the money we paid him. He kept the remainder of our money for the eighteen days we stayed there. He probably thinks he is ahead of the game because he still ripped us off for that short stay. But, poor, poor Jim does not know how to use social media.

So far, I have written reviews of our stay on TripAdvisor and Yelp. More than one Facebook group for equestrian travelers now knows to avoid the Full Circle Ranch. I have filed a complaint with the local Better Business Bureau. I have contacted websites that advertise B&Bs and informed them that the Full Circle Ranch should be delisted.  He may have succeeded in ripping us off, but his shabby treatment of us is going to cost him a heck of a lot more.  According to one of my Facebook groups, he has already had three cancellations based on my review. Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he bought the Full Circle Ranch to be a vacation home and a place where he can entertain the clients he overcharges for bad financial advice. Whatever, we no longer have to deal with him.

Overall, we feel lucky. We have stayed at more than 100 horse sites and this is our first truly awful experience. We have a better idea of how to protect ourselves from crooks and we will be a lot more careful when we spend an extended period of time anywhere.