Lawmaker Proposing A Housing Lemon Law
– November 15, 2007
If you buy a new home, you expect near perfection. Investigative reporter Andy Pierrotti tracked down a South Carolina lawmaker who wants to pass the first housing lemon law in the country to fix the state’s bad building boom.
Sherry Davidson doesn’t live in a shoe, but she has so many home problems she doesn’t know what to do. From rotten floor boards…
“Because the water drains into the house instead of away from the house.”
To exposed wires. Davidson says her builder is forcing her to live in a lemon.
“In fact we thought about painting it yellow and putting a great big lemon on the front of it because everyone knows it anyway.”
Three years after closing on her North Charleston home, she still has a long list of problems she claims the builder won’t fix. She posted her problems on a 17 foot banner for neighbors and her builder to see in her front yard.
She’s not alone. Many asked for refunds, or new homes and builders claim they were not given an opportunity to fix the problems.
While the bickering over building issues will likely never go away, a new law is in the works to get homeowners to fix construction issues quicker.
“We don’t want a person to have to wait two or three months, we want it to be done in a matter of a few weeks.”
Berkeley County state representative Joe Jefferson plans to file the first housing lemon law bill in the state house. He says it’s not an indictment against builders but a request for more accountability.
“We need better teeth into our existing laws, and that lemon law is going to de exactly that,” said Jefferson.
Under the proposed bill contractors have 120 days to fix home defects or the homeowner may request a new home of equal value or request a full refund.
Builders are not sold on the idea.
“We’re not sure there is a need for it, I mean there remedies in place already people who owns homes through state law.”
Phillip Ford is executive director of Trident Builders Association. Of the 12,000 new homes built in the Charleston area over two years he says bad construction is rare.
“First of all, I don’t think there’s a wide-spread problem, I think there are isolated problems, maybe in this market. You can’t built 12,000 homes, it’s like building a million cars, you’re gonna have some problems,” said Ford.
Davidson says she cannot afford to fix her home, and doesn’t think anyone will buy it.
“We’ve had the home on the market for four five months, and we haven’t even had a looker. People know that we have a lemon.
Homeowners living in lemons and waiting for the state to take action against builders who build bad homes.
Texas state lawmakers tried to pass a similar bill last year, but it failed to get enough votes. Jefferson cannot introduce the bill until January. And he’s still trying to find an agency to enforce the bill too.
Click here to read the proposed bill.
Click here for the rest of our series about lemon laws.
Also, if you think you live in a lemon now go back and find your property disclosures. In 1993 South Carolina began requiring people selling their homes to disclose, through a checklist of sorts, any problems with the home. If a problem pops up within three years and the previous owner lied about it on the check list they may be liable to pay damages.
Call the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs at, 1-800-922-1594 if you need to file a complaint about your home.
COMMENTS
This 11/15 news cast was particularly interesting to me.
Admittedly, I have a beautiful-looking home. It looks like the dream house I paid an awful lot of money for in February 2005—HOWEVER—aside from all the punchlist items [100+], within 2 months of moving in to my newly built house, I had toxic levels of mold [and I am very allergic to mold], which are still not completely remediated.
I have had other safety issues to include a front door that did not dead bolt for over 18-months, 2-gas leaks and a backdraft from a fireplace just found in 2007 to be out of code.
Aside from the inconvenience of never having been able to really move in to my house and call it a home, I have numerous health issues, have missed a lot of work, and have been menatlly and physically distressed over this whole issue.
In 2006, I contacted State Government officials, of which a couple responded [and subsequently got my vote]—who directed me to the LLRC [who did not respond to my first call for help in 2005].
The LLRC did open an investigation and an inspector came to my house. It is unfortunate, but he did not include all the information in his report that should have been there and the builder was only fined $1000 and told to remediate my issues. Now they have reopened the case, as my fireplace was one of the items he failed to include in his report.
Bottom line, had a Lemon Law been in place—I would not be in the predicament or at the very least, would have been able to get a lawyer willing to go up against my builder and their very large parent company.
Sad as it is, I have been trying to sell my home since March 2007—but having to disclose mold and other issues for such a young structure is not helping and/or I may have to sell at a substantial loss.
I hope that Mr. Jefferson is succesful is his attempt to get this law passed.
Thanks.