These lawsuits against home builders are going to come in two varieties.
The first is fraud, in cases where home builders have also acted as mortgage brokers and, in doing so, have inflated would-be buyers salaries.
The second is going to be over shoddy construction (as I could give personal evidence of in Lancaster, Dallas County, Texas).
Of course, all of these lawsuits are going to further cripple the home-building industry, which might not be such a bad idea.
For details of a Pulte-built “house from hell,” read here.
4 comments:
Not many lawsuits will be arising from this since more than the vast majority of these contracts contain mandatory binding arbitration. MBA was put into builder contracts by the builders. Read about this on www.hobb.org. A bill was just filed in Congress called the MBA Fairness Act of 2007.
Read 2 breath taking stories on Texas Watch under Homebuilders and the best reporting just came from Business Week Magzazine called Bonfire of the Builders. (?)
It is posted on HOBB. An investigative story on this industry.
It was just announced on the news that foreclosure rates in Houston are up 75% from the same time last year. I guess some of our politicans think this is ok.
My interest-I have the house from hell in Houston.
Oh, I'm familiar with binding arbitration and with the MBA Fairness Act, which won't be made ex post facto, in all likelihood.
I still think that somebody's going to find a way to beat at least some of these MBA clauses.
As noted, I saw these same houses in the Metroplex.
Three-plus years later, with the ruling in Massachusetts, we know now exactly the opening for an avalanche of lawsuits after all.
The homebuilders won't be the targets, perhaps, though, who knows what we will find out?
To add to the previous content, if there's even a snowball's chance of tying alleged homebuilder fraud to mortgage service fraud, binding arbitration won't be worth toilet paper. Even more so if homebuilders, along with banks, other lenders and mortgage originators, etc., get class-actioned.
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