What You Probably Never Knew About New Home Builders

Most of the desirable places to build homes in, happen to already be taken these days. New home builders most choose from among the leftovers - places where the soil isn't what it should be. When a home they build a home on expansive soil or soil that is known to expand and swell when it rains, your home could fall prey to a number of problems. If the soil under the back porch begins to expand, it will begin to pull your back porch away from the rest of your home.

About half of all new homes in Southern California are built on soil like this.  in a litigious society like California's, that's a lot of construction lawsuits waiting to happen. And some of them are not even waiting.

Building on unsuitable soil isn’t the only kind of construction mistake that new homebuilders can make. About five years ago, as was widely reported, a bunch of hillside homes in La Jolla in California just slid off their foundations and went down the hill after a landslide occurred. In other words, if you're buying a new home today, you have to really do that soil test first and make sure that the builders using the right building techniques for the soil.

New home builders have forever depended on the old "slip a few poor quality materials in" trick to make a little extra money on the side. Ever since the housing market collapsed five years ago though, it's grown worse. They've built homes with very thin roofs that are not sealed against rain water leakage, they’ve built them with the drinking water pipes cross-connected to the drainage pipes, they've built without hurricane straps that keep the house bolted to the foundation when a hurricane blows by, they'll use substandard uncured wood and so on. When there is a hurricane, people just find their homes blowing away. And it isn't just the small building companies that do this. A major company like US Home has been caught doing this kind of thing.

It's surprising, you're thinking, that new homebuilders could cut corners in such serious ways and get away with it. Aren't they afraid of all the regulations they're violating and how the’ll be sued out of business?

Well, that that's the thing - those regulations aren’t as serious as you might think. Did you realize that only one out of three US states even have any regulatory body to oversee who gets to be a builder? A builder doesn't need any qualifications, any experience or anything at all in most states. Louisiana, Utah, Arizona and Maryland for the best states for enforcing standards. With the others, just about anything goes.