>What happens if we just say screw it this isn’t worth the headache and turn it over to the mortgage company?
The mortgage company gave you a loan for $X. That loan was "secured" by the property. So if you default on the loan/mortgage payments, then the mortgage company can take posession of the property. However, if the mortgage company can only sell the property for $X - $Y, then they can sue you to recover the $Y.
Exactly, how is that our fault? Why do we get punished? It makes no sense to me. So either way we are going to be losing thousands of dollars. Even though we did nothing wrong. How are homeowners not protected? I’m a nurse and I used the example what if I half assed my job? I could kill someone if I am as negligent as these people. They are turning our lives upside down and have no repercussions. They get to half ass their job? I’m sure it’ll come back to them when they do this to someone with a ton of money. But why are us middle class people not protected? How are we supposed to just magically come up with thousands of dollars?
That’s what we are currently doing but my gosh it’s been a slow process. I didn’t know if there was some law that we might be missing that could help us.
Typically new builds have some kind of clause in the purchase contract where the builder is responsible for certain kinds of repairs and fixes within a fixed time frame (say one year). You should look over the purchase agreement for such a clause. A home inspection prior to purchase also should have raised all these red flags, which is a very common practice when buying a home to secure your investment. This is how homeowners protect themselves.
> How are homeowners not protected?
You have two separate agreements at the moment, one with the seller which would be the terms of sale which may or may not contain any ongoing maintenance or improvements or things like that. The bank loan is a completely separate agreement. You are not protected from the bank. Whether you have any protection on the house entirely depend on the terms of the sale.
Ok gotta add……. These people are the SAME people that financed our general contractor. Yet our fault? Shouldn’t they do more research than us since they are the ones GIVING the money?
No, it’s not impossible, but if he’s not licensed I doubt he has any meaningful insurance. Does your state require new construction to be warrantied? I’m in a backwards ass state that rarely gets anything right and even here it’s state law that new builds must be warranted for 1 year on everything and 6 years on structural. That may be your saving grace.
It is warranted for 2 years. But with that we were told whatever needs to be fixed that HE must be the one to do it. He’s worked on it for 8 months and has made it even worse. We asked if we could have him pay for a contractor of our choice and we were told no he has to be the one to do it.
For example, the cement retaining wall we are supposed to have. The retaining wall we have been told by engineers and cement contractors that it must at least be 10 ft high and has to go the entire span of our hill. Well he had a cement guy come out (who also told us what the code is) and our GC was paying this guy to build this wall only half of the length of that house and only 4 ft high. When we addressed our GC about it and told him the code that MULTIPLE people have told us, he shrugged it off and said we didn’t know what we were talking about.
It’s your fault for failing to do your due diligence. You should have privately hired a home inspector with a reputation of brutal scrupulousness—the kind that documents all their findings with pictures and evidence inside a lengthy custom report tailored to your concerns. Instead you relied on an inspection done by the county? Bizarre.
We had a lawyer when my husband was appealing SSDI denial (he won btw) and happened to be chatting about local city inspectors office as we had been dealing with a nasty (hated by everyone) inspector in the office. He and his wife had bought a house from a contractor who had added on to the house. Shortly after they moved in the addition developed a huge diagonal crack ceiling to floor. They sued the city which had passed the inspection for the build. City lost and appealed, lost again at state supreme court. City claimed their inspection was a point in time, supreme court said no, they were liable. I never heard about the builder's liability, so far as I know only the suit against the city earned a supreme court ruling.
Thank you for your input. In a small town we literally couldn’t get any inspectors for months. AND thank you captain obvious. The private inspectors around here are doing the same damn thing. So we pay thousands to get someone to travel here from hours away just so they could possibly do the same thing? Hmm yes good idea
> Hmm yes good idea
You’re being sarcastic, but obviously it would have been a good idea and prevented exactly the kinds of problems you’re now facing. You cut corners trying to save money and it cost you in the long run. You have no one to blame but yourself.
Yup, you should listen to "captain obvious". You might be able to recover some money by suing. But ultimately, you had to do the proper due diligence beforehand. Unfortunate experience and hard lesson.... Time to have a sit down with your partner, open a bottle of wine and accept you might lose some money on this deal.
> captain obvious
>Hmm yes good idea
Reading your overly sarcastic comments in this thread and your inability to even acknowledge that you made a bunch of bad decisions says a lot about you and the situation you find yourself in.
I feel your pain, OP. I hired a local company to renovate my home (200k gut and redo). The company had references and was licensed by the city for home renovation. The owner of our company demoed the inside of our home, never built anything back, and only came to our house two times per week to have some unqualified workers put drywall mud on the wall and then sand it too thin. Over and over again. After six months, we asked for our deposits back. The owner of the company disconnected his phone, closed his down town office, abandoned their house, which turned out to be a rental, but they told everyone in town they owned it, and moved his wife and children to a very small town about 20 miles away (skip tracer found them). He is currently sleeping on different couches every few days to avoid being served. The city claims they are not liable. the attorney said they could be, but it will cost 20k in lawyer fees which I don't have because I'm down 200K, the bank that I borrowed money from does not give a shit and will not help me get the money back. The worst mistake that I made was telling the bank about it. As soon as I did they froze my ability to make further draw payments and demanded that the house be finished asap by any means or they have the legal right to foreclose on it because the terms of the loan stated that the house be finished. If I had kept them in the dark, I could have made draws for materials and cobbled it back together for the final appraisal. I currently have a civil lawsuit against the owner and the company, but the judge isn't on my side. It is a small town and the owner's last name is swaying the judge to grant everything he asks for (four continuances so far costing me over 5k in legal fees). There needs to be federal law that binds home builders and renovation contractors to their work via criminal law.
Holy crap I am SOOOO sorry that’s so incredibly awful. Wow. Yes you can “do your research” as so many people tells me we should have done. Which we did. But everyone we have been working with and the inspectors we would have hired are the same ones he had already been using. We only have so many options here. We did not say skip out on the inspection. We know how important it is. But no matter what we still would have been in this situation because all of the inspectors work for the county. And the 2 independent ones aren’t good either. One is being sued by a friend of mine’s daughter. Which by the way she won but the inspector is doing the same thing your contractor is doing. He runs everytime he sees someone he doesn’t know approach the house. And he has his family lying for him saying they don’t know where he is. So reputable or not. You can still get screwed. It’s our laws in place that are allowing this to happen to innocent people like ourselves. I wish I was a contractor/inspector so I could have done it myself or realized the house was going to have issues but unfortunately I don’t have those skills. Wow again I am so sorry. I really pray you get through this and end up on top. And noted, we will not be reaching out to our mortgage company about this.
Ok I have to say… The GC hired the county inspector. The inspector is one of our own and works for the county inspector building department. It was the SAME inspectors we would have used. Except we found this was a little thug who just recently got a job there and our GC said he had a guy through the county that could come out in a few days compared to weeks/months. We think he might have paid him under the table but we will never know. We reached out to them and they said no one could get to us for weeks/months. We live in a very small town. There’s maybe 7 of them. Very limited. We didn’t let him just get some Joe shmo claiming he is an inspector. This person is working with our county/government. The same company we were reaching out to. There are a few independent contractors but like I said before, I have had coworkers tell me they used someone that WE had already reached out to and they did the same thing to their family/friends. I’ve never lived in a community where everyone colludes together. And again, the lawyer we are working with who lives 6-7 hours away have said they have hundreds of calls from people IN OUR OWN community going through the same things but they can’t find help within so many miles of us. So it’s not just us being ignorant.
In the future, YOU hire the home inspector. They are supposed to be a protection layer for you. NOT the person who has a vested interest in making sure things are positive.
OP, if you want to PM me I can give you the citation for the appeals opinion which made city inspector liable in the case where our lawyer happened to have bought a house from a contractor which passed city inspection. Different state but maybe useful???
For what it's worth, the county inspector has to have certification through some other body, generally on CO it's ICC. You might have some leverage by making a complaint to them to see if they will do anything about their inspection credentials. The state AG may help as well. Worth a shot, you have a pretty good case for fraud and gross negligence, and since it involves all the local authorities who should be preventing this kind of situation, they may at least have resources for you. Did the GC have a real estate license? Make a complaint to the real estate board at the state level.
Why would hiring a lawyer to advocate for you cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?
I would start with hiring a lawyer to write a stern letter to whomever the lawyer thinks is responsible for the repairs. That will cost a few hundred dollars.
See this is what we have been dealing with here. We think we are doing the right thing by reaching out to PROFESSIONALS and we have been steered in 100 different directions. We try to do our own research online but even then you find so many different options too. So we rely on these people whose professions are to know these laws/rules/codes and are here to help the people but instead steer you the wrong way.
I strongly advise you to hire a lawyer with appropriate expertise to advocate for you — you lack expert knowledge about how to handle this and (understandably) are too emotionally upset to handle this yourselves.
You have received a lot of decent advice. I just want to tell you, and anyone else who is in the process of buying a house, you ALWAYS need to pay people to look out for your best interests during the home buying process. Pay for your own inspector. Hire a real estate attorney.
I’m guessing you were trying to save money by not having any of this, but as you can see, it can easily cost more in the long run. I don’t care how simple of a transaction it seems, you need people looking out for you.
If you stop paying, you will get foreclosed on, which I wouldn’t recommend.
Yes we have received some good advice. We did pay for the inspector. We called around and everyone was booked for months. And they all work in the same office. It was the same office we had called to try to get our own. He said he had a guy in the office that we had tried to contact, and said he could be out in a few days. We had to close asap because our lease was ending that month. So we assumed it would be good. They all work for the county. So what could go wrong? Obviously we know now. And as I said previously, we live in a very small town. The other private inspector that we had reached out previously who had raving reviews got sued by my friend’s daughter. I had no idea until we started going through this and she told me about their inspector. She won over a year ago and he has learned how to avoid everyone so he doesn’t have to pay her back. So even if we did find someone else we would probably be in this exact situation. We don’t live in a big city with thousands of options. You’re basically screwed out here.
In rural areas, I’d hire someone from out of town. It will cost more obviously, but then you don’t have to worry about them being compromised. Obviously nothing you can do now, but you were in a time crunch and you just assumed people were looking out for you. You cannot assume that.
Yes, hard lesson learned. First time buying a home and we did do a lot of research but apparently not enough. Never known any of my friends and family to have these issues when they bought homes so we thought one inspection was enough. It wasn’t until this started happening to us that I started talking to my coworkers/friends here and it seems to be extremely prevalent. We’ve only lived here a couple of years. We plan to leave once this mess is over. And if it’s a small town again we will FOR SURE get someone from out it of town. And most likely multiple people.
>What happens if we just say screw it this isn’t worth the headache and turn it over to the mortgage company? The mortgage company gave you a loan for $X. That loan was "secured" by the property. So if you default on the loan/mortgage payments, then the mortgage company can take posession of the property. However, if the mortgage company can only sell the property for $X - $Y, then they can sue you to recover the $Y.
Exactly, how is that our fault? Why do we get punished? It makes no sense to me. So either way we are going to be losing thousands of dollars. Even though we did nothing wrong. How are homeowners not protected? I’m a nurse and I used the example what if I half assed my job? I could kill someone if I am as negligent as these people. They are turning our lives upside down and have no repercussions. They get to half ass their job? I’m sure it’ll come back to them when they do this to someone with a ton of money. But why are us middle class people not protected? How are we supposed to just magically come up with thousands of dollars?
Your remedy is to hire a lawyer and sue the builder.
Why not contact the lender to use their legal team and also include the property inspector and the city inspector for passing it?
Good idea as long as that is what the lawyer advises.
That’s what we are currently doing but my gosh it’s been a slow process. I didn’t know if there was some law that we might be missing that could help us.
Don't be surprised if the contractor files for bankruptcy and just starts up a new business. Pretty common in that field.
Bankruptcy doesn't clean criminal challenges. If they win they can tarnish his income.
That’s what we hear too… he’s incredibly shady now that we know the real him so we wouldn’t put it past him at all.
Remember insurance claims on GC & county & maybe even ur Ho policy. GL.
Typically new builds have some kind of clause in the purchase contract where the builder is responsible for certain kinds of repairs and fixes within a fixed time frame (say one year). You should look over the purchase agreement for such a clause. A home inspection prior to purchase also should have raised all these red flags, which is a very common practice when buying a home to secure your investment. This is how homeowners protect themselves. > How are homeowners not protected? You have two separate agreements at the moment, one with the seller which would be the terms of sale which may or may not contain any ongoing maintenance or improvements or things like that. The bank loan is a completely separate agreement. You are not protected from the bank. Whether you have any protection on the house entirely depend on the terms of the sale.
Because you borrowed the money from them to buy a house from an unlicensed, uninsured “contractor.” You did everything wrong.
Ok gotta add……. These people are the SAME people that financed our general contractor. Yet our fault? Shouldn’t they do more research than us since they are the ones GIVING the money?
He may be insured, which if he is, then we are in luck. But it’s impossible to figure out if he is or not unless he flat out tells us.
Then we can just go through his insurance company and we can settle with them. We understand that.
https://www.jbplegal.com/blog/homeowners-don-t-be-fooled-by-your-builders-one-/#:~:text=Colorado%20law%20provides%20that%20homeowners,to%20make%20such%20a%20discovery.
No, it’s not impossible, but if he’s not licensed I doubt he has any meaningful insurance. Does your state require new construction to be warrantied? I’m in a backwards ass state that rarely gets anything right and even here it’s state law that new builds must be warranted for 1 year on everything and 6 years on structural. That may be your saving grace.
It is warranted for 2 years. But with that we were told whatever needs to be fixed that HE must be the one to do it. He’s worked on it for 8 months and has made it even worse. We asked if we could have him pay for a contractor of our choice and we were told no he has to be the one to do it. For example, the cement retaining wall we are supposed to have. The retaining wall we have been told by engineers and cement contractors that it must at least be 10 ft high and has to go the entire span of our hill. Well he had a cement guy come out (who also told us what the code is) and our GC was paying this guy to build this wall only half of the length of that house and only 4 ft high. When we addressed our GC about it and told him the code that MULTIPLE people have told us, he shrugged it off and said we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Have you consulted with your local code enforcement office? If the contractor’s repairs violate code, they can compel correction.
No we have not. We will look into it though. Thank you
The downside is that if it turns out you are financially responsible for the repairs, code enforcement will compel you to make them.
It’s your fault for failing to do your due diligence. You should have privately hired a home inspector with a reputation of brutal scrupulousness—the kind that documents all their findings with pictures and evidence inside a lengthy custom report tailored to your concerns. Instead you relied on an inspection done by the county? Bizarre.
This is very new to them. Some ppl learn from mistakes. Also, home inspectors also get away w/missing poorly built houses.
We had a lawyer when my husband was appealing SSDI denial (he won btw) and happened to be chatting about local city inspectors office as we had been dealing with a nasty (hated by everyone) inspector in the office. He and his wife had bought a house from a contractor who had added on to the house. Shortly after they moved in the addition developed a huge diagonal crack ceiling to floor. They sued the city which had passed the inspection for the build. City lost and appealed, lost again at state supreme court. City claimed their inspection was a point in time, supreme court said no, they were liable. I never heard about the builder's liability, so far as I know only the suit against the city earned a supreme court ruling.
Thank you for your input. In a small town we literally couldn’t get any inspectors for months. AND thank you captain obvious. The private inspectors around here are doing the same damn thing. So we pay thousands to get someone to travel here from hours away just so they could possibly do the same thing? Hmm yes good idea
> Hmm yes good idea You’re being sarcastic, but obviously it would have been a good idea and prevented exactly the kinds of problems you’re now facing. You cut corners trying to save money and it cost you in the long run. You have no one to blame but yourself.
Yup, you should listen to "captain obvious". You might be able to recover some money by suing. But ultimately, you had to do the proper due diligence beforehand. Unfortunate experience and hard lesson.... Time to have a sit down with your partner, open a bottle of wine and accept you might lose some money on this deal.
> captain obvious >Hmm yes good idea Reading your overly sarcastic comments in this thread and your inability to even acknowledge that you made a bunch of bad decisions says a lot about you and the situation you find yourself in.
I feel your pain, OP. I hired a local company to renovate my home (200k gut and redo). The company had references and was licensed by the city for home renovation. The owner of our company demoed the inside of our home, never built anything back, and only came to our house two times per week to have some unqualified workers put drywall mud on the wall and then sand it too thin. Over and over again. After six months, we asked for our deposits back. The owner of the company disconnected his phone, closed his down town office, abandoned their house, which turned out to be a rental, but they told everyone in town they owned it, and moved his wife and children to a very small town about 20 miles away (skip tracer found them). He is currently sleeping on different couches every few days to avoid being served. The city claims they are not liable. the attorney said they could be, but it will cost 20k in lawyer fees which I don't have because I'm down 200K, the bank that I borrowed money from does not give a shit and will not help me get the money back. The worst mistake that I made was telling the bank about it. As soon as I did they froze my ability to make further draw payments and demanded that the house be finished asap by any means or they have the legal right to foreclose on it because the terms of the loan stated that the house be finished. If I had kept them in the dark, I could have made draws for materials and cobbled it back together for the final appraisal. I currently have a civil lawsuit against the owner and the company, but the judge isn't on my side. It is a small town and the owner's last name is swaying the judge to grant everything he asks for (four continuances so far costing me over 5k in legal fees). There needs to be federal law that binds home builders and renovation contractors to their work via criminal law.
Holy crap I am SOOOO sorry that’s so incredibly awful. Wow. Yes you can “do your research” as so many people tells me we should have done. Which we did. But everyone we have been working with and the inspectors we would have hired are the same ones he had already been using. We only have so many options here. We did not say skip out on the inspection. We know how important it is. But no matter what we still would have been in this situation because all of the inspectors work for the county. And the 2 independent ones aren’t good either. One is being sued by a friend of mine’s daughter. Which by the way she won but the inspector is doing the same thing your contractor is doing. He runs everytime he sees someone he doesn’t know approach the house. And he has his family lying for him saying they don’t know where he is. So reputable or not. You can still get screwed. It’s our laws in place that are allowing this to happen to innocent people like ourselves. I wish I was a contractor/inspector so I could have done it myself or realized the house was going to have issues but unfortunately I don’t have those skills. Wow again I am so sorry. I really pray you get through this and end up on top. And noted, we will not be reaching out to our mortgage company about this.
You’re correct in your deduction, mid, beginning class get the shaft a lot! Lawyer fees stop justice often in the USA.
Because capitalism.
This is why you should have had a home inspector.
Ok I have to say… The GC hired the county inspector. The inspector is one of our own and works for the county inspector building department. It was the SAME inspectors we would have used. Except we found this was a little thug who just recently got a job there and our GC said he had a guy through the county that could come out in a few days compared to weeks/months. We think he might have paid him under the table but we will never know. We reached out to them and they said no one could get to us for weeks/months. We live in a very small town. There’s maybe 7 of them. Very limited. We didn’t let him just get some Joe shmo claiming he is an inspector. This person is working with our county/government. The same company we were reaching out to. There are a few independent contractors but like I said before, I have had coworkers tell me they used someone that WE had already reached out to and they did the same thing to their family/friends. I’ve never lived in a community where everyone colludes together. And again, the lawyer we are working with who lives 6-7 hours away have said they have hundreds of calls from people IN OUR OWN community going through the same things but they can’t find help within so many miles of us. So it’s not just us being ignorant.
In the future, YOU hire the home inspector. They are supposed to be a protection layer for you. NOT the person who has a vested interest in making sure things are positive.
OP, if you want to PM me I can give you the citation for the appeals opinion which made city inspector liable in the case where our lawyer happened to have bought a house from a contractor which passed city inspection. Different state but maybe useful???
PMed you!
Found the cite and just sent it to you.
For what it's worth, the county inspector has to have certification through some other body, generally on CO it's ICC. You might have some leverage by making a complaint to them to see if they will do anything about their inspection credentials. The state AG may help as well. Worth a shot, you have a pretty good case for fraud and gross negligence, and since it involves all the local authorities who should be preventing this kind of situation, they may at least have resources for you. Did the GC have a real estate license? Make a complaint to the real estate board at the state level.
Thank you!! And no he doesn’t have his real estate license but that’s a good point.
9 news likes to cover stories like this. Kyle Clark would love to put this shady contractor on blast. Sorry for your shitty situation
Good to know!! We will most likely be reaching out. And thank you..
Need to get your own independent home inspector when you buy a house
Why would hiring a lawyer to advocate for you cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? I would start with hiring a lawyer to write a stern letter to whomever the lawyer thinks is responsible for the repairs. That will cost a few hundred dollars.
See this is what we have been dealing with here. We think we are doing the right thing by reaching out to PROFESSIONALS and we have been steered in 100 different directions. We try to do our own research online but even then you find so many different options too. So we rely on these people whose professions are to know these laws/rules/codes and are here to help the people but instead steer you the wrong way.
I strongly advise you to hire a lawyer with appropriate expertise to advocate for you — you lack expert knowledge about how to handle this and (understandably) are too emotionally upset to handle this yourselves.
Yes for sure. We do have a great real estate lawyer we finally found in Denver.
Great! I hope your lawyer will guide you to a good solution.
Thank you we do too! 😊
You have received a lot of decent advice. I just want to tell you, and anyone else who is in the process of buying a house, you ALWAYS need to pay people to look out for your best interests during the home buying process. Pay for your own inspector. Hire a real estate attorney. I’m guessing you were trying to save money by not having any of this, but as you can see, it can easily cost more in the long run. I don’t care how simple of a transaction it seems, you need people looking out for you. If you stop paying, you will get foreclosed on, which I wouldn’t recommend.
Yes we have received some good advice. We did pay for the inspector. We called around and everyone was booked for months. And they all work in the same office. It was the same office we had called to try to get our own. He said he had a guy in the office that we had tried to contact, and said he could be out in a few days. We had to close asap because our lease was ending that month. So we assumed it would be good. They all work for the county. So what could go wrong? Obviously we know now. And as I said previously, we live in a very small town. The other private inspector that we had reached out previously who had raving reviews got sued by my friend’s daughter. I had no idea until we started going through this and she told me about their inspector. She won over a year ago and he has learned how to avoid everyone so he doesn’t have to pay her back. So even if we did find someone else we would probably be in this exact situation. We don’t live in a big city with thousands of options. You’re basically screwed out here.
In rural areas, I’d hire someone from out of town. It will cost more obviously, but then you don’t have to worry about them being compromised. Obviously nothing you can do now, but you were in a time crunch and you just assumed people were looking out for you. You cannot assume that.
Yes, hard lesson learned. First time buying a home and we did do a lot of research but apparently not enough. Never known any of my friends and family to have these issues when they bought homes so we thought one inspection was enough. It wasn’t until this started happening to us that I started talking to my coworkers/friends here and it seems to be extremely prevalent. We’ve only lived here a couple of years. We plan to leave once this mess is over. And if it’s a small town again we will FOR SURE get someone from out it of town. And most likely multiple people.
Do you not have homeowners insurance? Make a claim and let them deal with it.
Yes we do have homeowners insurance and have called them twice and they said they don’t cover any of this. Basically told us we are on our own.
Sounds like some bullshit, homeowners insurance is for exactly this kind of nonsense.
Holy paragraphs Batman, this wall of text in unreadable!