THE BIG BLACK HOLE

As we creep slowly through this hurtful so called recession and housing mess, I find, as I’ve mentioned before, that the majority of the Home Inspections that I’m hired to perform are for people purchasing short sales and foreclosures. But another trend that I’m beginning to see emerge more and more is requests from home owners of almost new homes that are finding defects or other adverse issues involving their ‘new castles’ and they are getting the ‘cold shoulder’ or ‘silence treatment’ from their Contractor that built the home when they bring these issues to the Contractors attention. This sort of situation, unfortunately, immediately separates the Contractor that stands behind his product and wants to maintain high quality and a good reputation by providing good customer service from the one that was just ‘in it’ for the quick buck and doesn’t want to hear about ‘your’ problems.

During the building boom of the 90’s and especially the 2001 through 2007 time frame, the demand for new homes was incredible. Forget regular families wanting to buy homes for themselves, investors would rush in and buy homes in various areas that hadn’t even been started yet because they were counting on the value of the home to increase 10% to 50% by the time the home was actually built! This behavior put immense pressure on the construction trades to pump these homes out as fast as they could. Construction workers were in a severe shortage and many construction crews were filled out with illegal aliens and other workers of questionable experience. Language differences made communication barriers a daily dilemma and a detriment to making sure what the project foreman wanted accomplished actually occurred. Sadly, this scenario has, at least in my mind, created a huge black hole of substandard or defective structures in our housing inventory. This is thousands, if not millions of homes and other structures that will be problematic and a maintenance pain for years to come. This will cost us all way more money than we can ever imagine. The lawyers will get involved and there will be lawsuits until hell won’t have them. People that paid good, hard earned money to have the home built right the first time will find themselves in a predicament where they have to pay again, only more, to have it repaired, but this time done properly. What a waste!

So, what to do? I used to promote “11 month” inspections for people with new homes because the industry recognized warranty period for the builder was one year. But most people just scoffed at me saying: “Why should I spend good money on an inspection of a brand new house? You will never find anything wrong; it’s brand new. What could possibly be wrong, it was inspected numerous times by the local building department?” Well, I wonder what these same people are thinking now that they are discovering and having to live with or repair at their expense all of these defects as they unfortunately begin to discover them? Most Contractors really do care about the product they build and also care a lot about their good reputation. Let’s hope those builders that receive complaints have the wear-with-all to properly take care of the issues and protect and stand behind the big investment and trust their customers made in the homes they built.