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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
It’s not just homes. I was working at a place when it moved to a newly built office. Plagued with dumb mistakes. Most striking was when we got into summer. First really humid day, AC stopped, wouldn’t turn back on, and then we realized water was seeping from the ceiling in the bathroom. Room was drenched. Turns out, the original building plan was for AC to use a water drain, but the building or fire inspector said it needed to be pumped. The builder did order a pump installed, but because it wasn’t in the plans, no electrical was built for it, so it was never plugged in. Just blatantly sloppy.
Between that and the condition of friends’ new homes we’d seen, we bought an older home, which has its own problems from age and previous owner workarounds, but we know any hidden and/or structural builder errors are long revealed.
My home was built for the original owners, and only owners before us in the early 90s as a labor of love and I wouldn’t trade a single one of my “older well loved home” problems for a new construction home that’s only real purpose is to fleece buyers