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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!”
Yup. Find a lawyer willing to work on contingency, and let them take the wheel.
Almost all lawyers will do this for this type of case, but you might be able to get away with paying a flat fee for them to send a strongly worded letter.
But, since most contractors are crooks, you’ll probably have to go to court. It really depends on your contract, though. You might have to go to arbitration, which is where getting a 3rd party inspection can be a life saver.
My inlaws had a garage built to house their RV and boat, and the contractor never once inspected his subcontractors’ work. They had it inspected, and it took the inspector 6 hours to take pictures of everything that was wrong. The report was like 120 pages long. They refused to pay the rest they owed him (they had already paid $90k), and he sued them for it.
They showed up in court with their contract, and the judge told him to fuck off, because the contract said they had to arbitrate before going to court.
Unfortunately, the contractor won the war of attrition, and they ended up with an unfinished piece of shit garage because they gave up fighting.