Bonfire of the Builders
Check out this week's print edition of Business Week for "Bonfire of the Builders." It shows how "the rush by builders into mortgage lending only exacerbated the current housing mess." There is also a companion article on the increase in construction defect and related claims by owners. Seems there are two owner organizations on the web: HomeOwners for Better Building and Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings. I wonder whether the construction defect owners and the HOA advocates will ever decide to join forces. If you put them together with seniors and consumer advocates, you would really have a powerful movement. But the problem is always that people want to be the head of their own organization and focus on their own particular issues.
2 comments:
QUOTE I wonder whether the construction defect owners and the HOA advocates will ever decide to join forces. QUOTE
Probably not Evan, as that would require them to be on the same side of an issue as CAI, since we have been fighting the construction defect fight for years on behalf of associations and individual homeowners.
Of course it happens quite frequently that we are on the same side of issues as the "advocates", but then you don't hear much about that.
Good point. Here we have an issue where CAI has worked for policies that made it possible for many HOAs to pay for repairs. That benefited owners--no doubt about it. But for some reason it is not always appreciated. I recall when I was doing construction defect work in San Diego, back in the old days, there were always some owners who opposed filing a lawsuit and thought it was a big ripoff by attorneys. But in nearly every case, it led to a big recovery. In many cases, if those suits hadn't been filed, the owners would have had to disclose the defects to prospective purchasers, which would have been very costly to the owners.
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