They have neither the equipment or expertise to satisfactorily complete an engineered retaining wall.
The main things I experienced with Cropper Brothers was harassment, overcharging, threatening to leave the job unfinished (to start on someone else's job), onsite damage and poor workmanship.
If you only take away one thing from this review it's that builders licences have points like a drivers licence. Cropper Bros Landscapes, at the time of writing have 12 demerit points against their 30 point licence. You can can investigate any builders licence through the QBCC site. We wish we had known to look for this beforehand. We have lodged a complaint with QBCC so by the time you read this, they may well have lost more points. Also always make sure the contract is a QBCC one. No other bodies contract has the same clout. The one we got was landscape qld - there are no protections for the client with these contracts - there is with a QBCC contract
Below is a detailed account of our experience with Cropper Bros Landscapes. This is our tale of woe. Weep ye and heed it well!
Our contract was to build 2 retaining walls 1 x 17m and 1 x 5m, aprroximately 1.8 metres high plus 2 piers (to hold down a shipping container) and a 4m colour bond fence. After waiting more than a month for them to be available they started work and hit rock in one corner, they did not notify us for 2 days, then did not provide a variation. They stopped work for 10 days to do someone else's construction and then carried on construction for a further 5 days. The following Tuesday we received a call from Copper Brothers stating they were going to leave the site without completing the work contracted, this was because they had run over time after hitting rock and their other jobs were now behind. Copper Brothers became quite aggressive on the phone when it was stated they could not leave the site without completing the job as we would not be able to get certification.
Regarding the harassment we paid Claim 1 within 3 days, we received claim 2 on a Tuesday and were charged an addition $9500.00 then were asked for payment on the Wednesday and Thursday. The Friday we received claim No. 3 at 10.30am with an additional $1800 being charged and the phone calls demanding payment started at 2.30pm on the same day! The calls were aggressive and after the 2nd call they were asked to stop calls and only communicate by txt or email. Following that message, over the next 3 days we received 10 phone calls first from numbers we recognised then from private numbers, we did not answer these calls and they kept on ringing even though they were told to stop, they also sent 17 txt messages and 8 emails over the 3 days.
The work onsite had not been completed as per the contract. They refused to complete all the items on the drawings that the quotes were based on. They damaged a sewer pipe and charged us for the repair. They also damaged the boundary fence, 2 manholes and a 15m tree on site and claimed they had a damage exclusion in the contract. The quality of the work is below standard, some of the posts have been roughly cut with a grinder at odd angles, there are large gaps between the panels and posts, almost nothing is straight, there are spacers left in between the panels to try to level them.
We tried to negotiate even though we had been charged 45% more than our original contract value and still did not have the job completed , they would not negotiate at all.

Approximate cost: $25000