Cyrus Dugger

Steps you can take if you find yourself living in a poorly made home

Dark side of the housing boom: Shoddy work Steps you can take if you find yourself living in a poorly made home. By Sarah Max, Money Magazine contributing writer

February 14, 2007: 11:07 AM EST

(Money Magazine) -- Less than a year after moving into her new 2,100-square-foot house in Lenexa, Kans., Susan Sabin has strung up lemon lights in her front window.

The lemons, she says, go perfectly with the home's most prominent features: jammed doors, warped windows, bent pipes and cracked walls. "The house is essentially splitting in two," says Sabin.

At the peak of the recent housing boom, home buyers scooped up a million newly built homes every year while homeowners poured more than $200 billion into renovations. But now stories of shifting soil, leaky roofs, damaged stucco and other construction defects abound.

Though many builders have worked to improve the quality of their houses over the past decade, says Alan Mooney, president of Criterium Engineers, a national engineering firm, the building frenzy also opened the door for unskilled labor, unscrupulous contractors and untested products.

"When everyone is out there building as fast as they can, that does result in more defects," he says.

Contractor problems rank among the most common consumer complaints, according to the Better Business Bureau, and a recent Criterium Engineers study found that 17 percent of new residential construction projects inspected by the firm in 2006 had at least two significant problems.

If you've been gnashing your teeth over defects in your new or recently renovated home (and complaining to the builder hasn't solved them), it's probably cold comfort that you're not alone.

What do you do? A lawsuit is bound to be expensive and messy, if you can even get in front of a jury at all; many builder's contracts nowadays include a binding-arbitration clause that essentially waives your right to a jury trial.

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Of course, your best bet is to catch the problem early, before you've paid for the work. But even after the job is long done, you still have a powerful tool on your side: the builder's need to protect his reputation.

Here's how to evaluate the likelihood that you'll be able to get your home repaired at minimal cost, and your plan of action. (link)

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