Worldwide Contractors Inc.

BUYER BEWARE: Steve Galasso, Real Estate Agent at Keller Williams Philadelphia (Center City), and owner of businesses going by Worldwide Contractors Inc., Worldwide General Contractors LLC, and Worldwide Asset Recovery Group LLC, has been dodging paying court ordered judgments for lawsuits brought against him since 2018. Please understand that if you work with this man, your money very well may be at stake, as in my past experience he has been irresponsible, unresponsive, and through and through unethical. For background and transparency, my husband and I hired him to renovate our basement in late 2018. Steven seemed competent and sharp at first, but after receiving our $15,000 deposit and setting up an arbitrary start date, we had to hound him weekly (with no success) to get updates and details on the status of our project. We paid him in November 2018, and he had not started any work by March 2019. When we asked about details on the project, he would avoid phone calls and text messages for up to 4 weeks at a time, and over time we learned he seemed to lack full knowledge on the work we hired him to perform. Ultimately due to a lack of confidence in both his ability and discipline to complete the work, and a fear of our investment going down the drain, we had no choice but to terminate him. He decided that it was his right to keep our $15,000 deposit. After many attempts to agree on an amount he should refund us, since he completed no physical labor and incurred only minor soft costs, he again was uncommunicative and forced us to file a lawsuit against him. We took him to court, where we coincidentally met another couple whom he swindled. In fact they had filed their suit against him one day before we filed our own. They confirmed our biggest fears- he finished their bathroom renovation, which now was leaking and cracking. So if we gave Steven the full contract, we could have potentially had our foundation collapse, yet he thought that we were trying to paint him wrongly and dismiss him prematurely. The judge “split the baby” and gave us a judgment of about 50/50. On the day of the court ordered judgment, Steve promised to pay the $6,500 judgment, but then later he tried to avoid payment because he has two contracting businesses with the same address, and he tried to claim one business was closed. When we filed a petition for a name change to the still open LLC he was then operating, he withdrew $21,000 in cash from his Wells Fargo business account one day before our petition for name change was granted. He then closed the account. This prevented us from collecting our court ordered judgment amount. We have tried to get back our money through Steve directly, but he blocks our calls and does not respond. The court’s opinion at this point is we need to file a lawsuit against Steve Galasso personally, as he has made a clear concerted effort to defraud a creditor, by actively choosing to avoid payment of the judgment despite having the funds to do so. I am writing this review as a warning as I see that he is switching careers but remaining in real estate, and now his unethical business history could negatively affect Philadelphia home buyers and sellers. I am surprised KW Philadelphia has not done further background checks on this individual. KW Philadelphia should look up the civil suits filed against this man and his businesses to understand the type of character they are now allowing to hang a real estate agent license with them. Search here: https://fjdclaims.phila.gov/phmuni/cms/search.do Cases against him: SC-19-03-28-6777, SC-19-03-29-6883, SC-20-10-06-3248 To buyers and sellers, if you do business with Steve Galasso, please understand the ramifications of his disorganization, lack of communication & professionalism, and unethical character flaws. Please feel free to look at Yelp where all other individuals who have hired him talk about his shoddy work. That sort of behaviour bleeds into all aspects of an individual’s performance. Do your due diligence before working with him, or you might have to write one of these reviews yourself a year from now.