We got absolutely screwed by the guy who sold us our house. Can you suggest some recourse?
We bought a house during the first week of August. It's a turn-of-the-century home (1911) and it's pretty. It's got some great features, like wavy windows, some enormous rooms, grand ceilings, and other old house features. The renovator put in a bunch of new stuff, mostly fixtures and lighting, but it looks nice.
As awesome as this sounds, we got screwed by the seller, and now it's time to get some recourse. We've been lied to, sold something that wasn't even nearly true, and we've run the gamut of things we can think to do. Let me fill you in on the story:
We bought this house from a guy who has a business of flipping houses and charging stupid ridiculous amounts for them. Cosmetically, his guys do pretty work - he apparently doesn't do any of it himself, and he hires crews of people who may or may not be licensed, though we were told they were. We didn't pay an exorbitant amount of money - but it was at the top of our range - and we paid this amount of money to buy a home that we thought was finished. The contract we signed was a "as is" contract, as I assume all houses are, and we are finding that not only did his guys do substandard work, but they royally screwed some things up as well. Some of the work that this guy's company did was pretty dangerous, pretty careless, and we didn't find out about it until after we'd been in the house for a few weeks.
You might ask yourself: "didn't your home inspector see this when he/she was inspecting?!" Well, much to our dismay, yes, the inspector did see it, and no, the inspector didn't tell us. I even asked the inspector, when I was having the house inspected (which the seller was present for, no less, along with myself and our real-estate agent), if he would feel comfortable me living in this house. He said, plainly, and to my face, "yes, I feel comfortable you buying this house." My wife called this inspector (who works for a small home inspection company) and asked him what the score was, as his report was inaccurate. He then proceeded to tell my wife that A) he thought the guy seemed shady just by meeting him, B) we shouldn't have bought this house, and C) he couldn't cause the seller to have to do a bunch of renovations due to a bad inspection, nor could he make the agent lose a sale. This all sounds pretty shady, especially since she was OUR agent, and we were gonna buy through her regardless. We basically paid this guy $300 for half a page of inspection report and some lies. We sold a home in Texas, and the inspection report was around 14 pages. This one was barely half a page.
This all came down when the remnants of a hurricane brought rain and wind through Oklahoma and drenched the state with over 6" of rain. Our roof essentially let several gallons of water – the entire width of our house at the addition – ruin the ceiling, walls, and other surfaces in our house. It was bad. We had a remediation expert come and give us an estimate, and it alone was over $5500 to remediate all of the wet plaster, ceiling, wall, and drywall surfaces that are damaged. This was two weeks ago – it's still raining from time to time, and the thing still leaks. We cannot unpack our stuff (we're essentially living out of the kitchen and upstairs bedroom with the majority of our stuff still filling two massive rooms on the first floor) and we can't use our furniture because when it rains, it leaks. The floor was damaged, and we've been dealing with this for a month.
The really crappy thing was that none of this damage was disclosed to us at ALL. When we looked at the house for the first time, there was a damaged part of the ceiling in the first floor addition, which, as a part of our contract was supposed to be fixed and solved as a condition of us buying the house. This obviously didn't happen. There's other cheap and dangerously-done stuff as well – for a small example, the lugs that tie our power to the city power are electrical taped instead of booted. If one of us were to grab onto one of those lugs, we'd die. This poor work and cosmetic fix stuff is present in all areas of the house.
The real bitch of this situation was that we were sold a "new" roof. The roof that this guy and his laborers put on was composition shingles over old wood shake. On one shallow part of the house, the addition, this guy put shingles on a roof with a pitch under 2 and 12 – we've since learned that no manufacturer recommends putting shingles on a surface that shallow, and the roofers have said things like "I can't believe this guy put shingles on here – only a matter of time before they either blow off or leak like a sieve." It is terrible, we were told that it was "New" and had no known problems, and roofers have estimated a new roof on all of the house between $6500 and ten grand.
We did call our home insurance agent, and we were told by the adjustor that the event that happened was a "wind event" and that the rain leakage was not directly related to wind damage. We'd only be able to get maybe a thousand bucks worth of damage fixed, which is essentially our deductible. So, we exhausted that route. We also called and met with one lawyer who told us that yes, we had a decent case, but it might take two years and $20 to 30 grand (of which we'd get most, but not all back) to get any progress. This is if he rushed.
What we want is to get this fixed. We want to get a new roof, get some of the other dangerous and damaging stuff fixed, and be done with this. How would you go about this?
We have a few ideas in mind – writing the seller a letter and giving him a week to respond, then calling the DA in our city and letting him know that someone is doing work as a company and selling it like a consumer and doing a really poor and dangerous job of such. We're also considering calling the city's permit offices and giving them a list of all of the properties this guy's company is selling (he pulled no permits on our major renovation, and he pulls no permits on any of his work). We're considering calling the local consumer advocate department of the local TV station and letting them know of this as well as protection to other buyers from this guy. My wife and I differ on some of the other post-non-communication-from-the-seller tactics, like calling INS and the city on him for hiring illegal labor (which I cannot prove, but the laborers we met do not speak English).
Can you suggest a course of action? Our ideal at this point would be to get out of this house completely, but we're pretty sure that we're not gonna get that. So we'll settle for getting the stuff that this guy's company did really poorly in the flip of this house.
Please post here, or we can take email at
livinginamoneypit@gmail.com
Subscribe
You should also be talking to the buyers agent you used who should have provided you with information on what to expect throughout the process.
You can try and make this as politically ugly for the flipper as possible and to get some compensation from them. You can consult an attorney who specializes in real estate law and they may be able to offer you some alternatives.
If the disclosures were fraudulent or incorrect the attorney can help you follow that through the legal channels, but it may be possible, if you approach this correctly, to just get the seller to meet you half way. Lawyer is the best bet for options.
Best of luck!
posted by iamabot at 5:24 PM on September 14, 2007