I recently bought a home built by Lennar. The project manager kept telling me up until closing about how great the warranty was. He said that the drywall in the hallway going to the basement was going to be finished. When I reported this to the person who handled the warranty he said that the basement wasn't going to be finished. I reported some issues with the cabinets and he said they wouldn't fix it until the 11 month period since he said other things could break until then. He also tried to discourage me from getting an 11 month inspection. When I moved on the grass was almost a foor long and there was a vile infestation in the backyard due to the grass being long. Whenever someone talks about how there is a warranty I usually chuckle a little. The companies know how much it would cost you to sue them.
To be clear small builders have done things far worse in Minnesota. There's a builder on the South side of the Twin Cities that has left many homes with foundation issues. They're no longer in business. My issues look tiny compared to theirs.
For anyone who wants to see clear examples of these defects from an inspectors point of view… For a while I was completely addicted to watching inspection videos of brand new homes where the inspector shows poor craftsmanship and sometimes even dangerous defects - the best in the genre IMO is Cy https://youtube.com/@cyfyhomeinspections?si=zldoP3BpzK6mUzDc check out his YT shorts. Example after example of terrible defects in brand new homes in Arizona
It's shocking how poorly built these houses are. No insulation, broken roof trusses, gas leaks, concrete property walls falling over.
It's not like houses were always perfect in the past though. My 1953 house has construction debris mixed in to the concrete foundation in the corner of the garage, where I assume they ran out of concrete, and knots in the roof planks patched with garbage as well.
Sure maybe they weren't perfect in the past but were they this expensive (compared to income)? In the Cy videos I can't believe how much some of the homes cost and the things he finds wrong.
This is not new. I just watched a video a few days ago talking about Levittown, built in the post-WWII boom, where the house lots were just big enough to build septic systems for each, given the current state of the ground/drainage. So as the soil compacted/absorbed the output of the houses, and as people installed washing machines, and and as people converted their attics to additional bedrooms (which they were originally told was fine to do) and occupancy/water use went up, hundreds (thousands?) of backyards became soft, smelly swamps. Eventually the whole neighborhood had to switch to sewers, at enormous expense.
Nothing under the sun is new, but we do currently live in a time with unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt for clearly immoral behavior as long as they get away with it.
And even in cases where what you do is explicitly illegal legal enforcement is largely contingent on whether or not whatever corrupt thing you did made you rich enough to pay the Get Out of Jail tax.
> unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt as long as they get away with it.
Historically speaking, current levels of corruption in most of the world are either low, or completely precedented.
In the US specifically, corruption may be higher the last decade than in the couple of decades precloud, but certainly is not as high as 120 years ago.
For additional context; Levittown(s) were named by William Levitt the guy that is considered the creator/initiator of the archetypal suburb concept that would become one of the biggest destructive forces and cause of endless misery in American society.
They were the very basis of the subject fraud too, the incremental, cascading slide and destruction of quality through fraud, even if it took time for the incremental, “salami slicing” to get to this point where contacted, foreign national, fly by night operations underlying all the corporate builders are throwing together what in some cases are literal paper houses where even OSB sheathing has been replaced by what can only be called fancy cardboard.
I bought a home a few years ago. We chose an older 1940's wood home near downtown in a California town. Its solid. Meanwhile, friends of ours have bought newly constructed homes with all the modern features, and the horror stories they have...
It’s tricky. Buy 1970s or earlier and risk asbestos and lead issues (look how late asbestos was still used in a few things! It’s surprisingly late). Buy later than about 1985 and all the good old-growth wood was gone so it all sucks in different ways.
I wonder what exactly about the 1940's home made it solid. I want to build my own home one day, and I don't want it to fall apart the minute the builder's liability expires.
1) Litigation. We may partner with litigation firms that bring cases empowered by the facts our reporting uncovers, aimed at getting restitution for people who have been harmed. Relevant litigation deals are disclosed in our articles.
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- end quote
Not saying that these complaints aren’t valid, but this is PR dressed up as reportage by a short seller/litigation investor.
I've owned a range of 21st century construction in Texas. 2023, 2021, 2012 (current), 2009. The one built in 09 is easily the best out of the bunch. I'm currently looking at homes built in the 70s and 80s.
I've learned my lesson about cheap builds with 13 foot ceilings and gigantic rooms. I am over the scale of it all because the acoustics are so goddamned awful you can hardly sleep. Not one of these houses will ever have interior insulation or god forbid actual Rockwool installed anywhere, so the rooms resonate at frequencies that are impossible to mitigate. 13' ceilings have an axial room mode of ~43hz. Good luck mitigating that. Oftentimes the master bedroom has a dimension even larger than this. Your audio system might be tuned to avoid these ranges but traffic noise and the way the hvac system rumbles in your crawl space is much harder to. Pushing into infrasonic is only a viable option when you have an entire stadium at your disposal. This in between realm is awful. The inside of a Walmart feels better acoustically than many of the new homes built around it.
I am looking forward to having 9 foot ceilings and thick-ass brick all the way around again. I'll lose about a thousand sqft of living space and have to deal with all kinds of legacy issues, but at least it's built better.
>“You have to start value-engineering every component of the home, which means making compromises, not in quality, but in the way that you actually configure the homes,” Lennar CEO Stuart Miller said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last year.
>D.R. Horton similarly promised its investors it would find ways to cut costs, like “replacing certain high quality fixtures and finishes with less expensive yet still high-quality fixtures and finishes.”
Almost all new homes in the last 20 years are terrible. Every builder cuts corners. Inspections often can’t see where those savings were made. And insurance or warranties won’t help for many of them. It’s a huge scam and needs legislation.
Wouldn't surprise me. I live on a small loop that had a vacant lot next door to me (home burned down in the 80s shortly after construction and had stayed vacant until 3 years ago).
One of the big name builders in our county bought the land (we had only just bought our home next door and wish we had been in a position to buy the land) and through up the usual cubical blob with no eaves, no personality, and maximum possible square foot.
It's been three years and not two-three months has gone by without contractors being there to repair damage... fix the fence, fix the foundation, lift the foundation, repair drywall cracks, repair sagging floor, fix HVAC issues. All for the bargain basement price of $600K "builder grade" (Hah, once upon a time I was naive enough to think this meant high-end, not "cheapest shit that will pass code").
Companies enshittify in every sector to meet growth targets, and if you believe Bernanke the pressures on growth targets come from the global investment market struggling to find enough places to invest, but where does the undersupply of places to invest come from?
Is it just a civilization-wide structural incentive to overbuild investment capital relative to uses for it or is there a structural cause for inadequate quantities of reliable investment sinks?
Hmm. We (many of us, anyway) keep saying that the solution to housing shortages is to build more homes. But if they're going to be built badly, that somewhat lessens the value of that approach as a solution.
My experience as a homeowner with relatives in the construction trades is that any tract home / production builder will be equally shoddy. They don't need to be a large publicly traded company like Lennar, DR Horton, or KB Homes to do a terrible job, they just need the wrong incentive structure coupled with no enforcement of quality standards.
Realistically the only way to get a properly built house in the United States is to have a reputable custom home builder do the job, invest heavily in things like engineering up front to minimize geotechnical issues or structural issues that might arise later due to poor homesite choice or architect artistic overreach. That, or buy a well-built home that's already there from before we went fully into production building, which is really just houses made from around 1970 to 1995, before 1970 we were slapping up badly made houses to deal with the postwar boom and after 1995 we went fully into the corporate enshittification hellscape that we currently exist in.
Never, ever, skip an inspection, even on a brand new house, in fact that goes double for a brand new house.
To be clear small builders have done things far worse in Minnesota. There's a builder on the South side of the Twin Cities that has left many homes with foundation issues. They're no longer in business. My issues look tiny compared to theirs.
It's not like houses were always perfect in the past though. My 1953 house has construction debris mixed in to the concrete foundation in the corner of the garage, where I assume they ran out of concrete, and knots in the roof planks patched with garbage as well.
Nothing under the sun is new, but we do currently live in a time with unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt for clearly immoral behavior as long as they get away with it.
And even in cases where what you do is explicitly illegal legal enforcement is largely contingent on whether or not whatever corrupt thing you did made you rich enough to pay the Get Out of Jail tax.
Historically speaking, current levels of corruption in most of the world are either low, or completely precedented.
In the US specifically, corruption may be higher the last decade than in the couple of decades precloud, but certainly is not as high as 120 years ago.
They were the very basis of the subject fraud too, the incremental, cascading slide and destruction of quality through fraud, even if it took time for the incremental, “salami slicing” to get to this point where contacted, foreign national, fly by night operations underlying all the corporate builders are throwing together what in some cases are literal paper houses where even OSB sheathing has been replaced by what can only be called fancy cardboard.
We generate revenue in two ways:
1) Litigation. We may partner with litigation firms that bring cases empowered by the facts our reporting uncovers, aimed at getting restitution for people who have been harmed. Relevant litigation deals are disclosed in our articles.
2) Investment. When our reporting does not include Material Non-Public Information (“insider info”), we may share it with our affiliated fund. Relevant investments are disclosed in our articles.
- end quote
Not saying that these complaints aren’t valid, but this is PR dressed up as reportage by a short seller/litigation investor.
I've learned my lesson about cheap builds with 13 foot ceilings and gigantic rooms. I am over the scale of it all because the acoustics are so goddamned awful you can hardly sleep. Not one of these houses will ever have interior insulation or god forbid actual Rockwool installed anywhere, so the rooms resonate at frequencies that are impossible to mitigate. 13' ceilings have an axial room mode of ~43hz. Good luck mitigating that. Oftentimes the master bedroom has a dimension even larger than this. Your audio system might be tuned to avoid these ranges but traffic noise and the way the hvac system rumbles in your crawl space is much harder to. Pushing into infrasonic is only a viable option when you have an entire stadium at your disposal. This in between realm is awful. The inside of a Walmart feels better acoustically than many of the new homes built around it.
I am looking forward to having 9 foot ceilings and thick-ass brick all the way around again. I'll lose about a thousand sqft of living space and have to deal with all kinds of legacy issues, but at least it's built better.
>D.R. Horton similarly promised its investors it would find ways to cut costs, like “replacing certain high quality fixtures and finishes with less expensive yet still high-quality fixtures and finishes.”
Enshittification to the max
One of the big name builders in our county bought the land (we had only just bought our home next door and wish we had been in a position to buy the land) and through up the usual cubical blob with no eaves, no personality, and maximum possible square foot.
It's been three years and not two-three months has gone by without contractors being there to repair damage... fix the fence, fix the foundation, lift the foundation, repair drywall cracks, repair sagging floor, fix HVAC issues. All for the bargain basement price of $600K "builder grade" (Hah, once upon a time I was naive enough to think this meant high-end, not "cheapest shit that will pass code").
Is it just a civilization-wide structural incentive to overbuild investment capital relative to uses for it or is there a structural cause for inadequate quantities of reliable investment sinks?
Realistically the only way to get a properly built house in the United States is to have a reputable custom home builder do the job, invest heavily in things like engineering up front to minimize geotechnical issues or structural issues that might arise later due to poor homesite choice or architect artistic overreach. That, or buy a well-built home that's already there from before we went fully into production building, which is really just houses made from around 1970 to 1995, before 1970 we were slapping up badly made houses to deal with the postwar boom and after 1995 we went fully into the corporate enshittification hellscape that we currently exist in.
Never, ever, skip an inspection, even on a brand new house, in fact that goes double for a brand new house.