HOBB Community

There is a perceived market value for any newly built house regardless of how shabbily it is built.  This is something the corporate/public new house building industry must understand very well.  A new house can be built, with little regard or minimal cost, of effective quality control, as a fungible commodity.   Maximizing profit potential while minimizing costs.  Whether or not this is intentional is open to debate.  Whether or not the house has defects or is defective, seems to not matter, or matters very little.  A system is in effect which allows responsibility and accountability for defects to be the burden of the new house buyer. The new house buyer has the honesty, integrity, and goodwill of the new house builder as the primary assurance that the new house buyer will be made whole and not be stuck with a defective product.
Study this web site carefully, do your own homework.  What we are talking about here, is the largest investment of capital that most people will make in their  family's life.

<<The new house buyer has the honesty, integrity, and goodwill of the new house builder as the primary assurance that the new house buyer will be made whole and not be stuck with a defective product.>>

Right. And this explains why home builders invented contracts that added forced binding arbitration, default gag orders, lobbied for tort reform, paid out millions in campaign contributions and even manipulated elections...all to reinforce that required assumption of integrity. Sad thing is, some of them do have integrity, but on the surface they all look much the same with or without. Many of them actually believe that integrity means they're not being competitive.

I liken some of the explanation to experiences decades ago when I worked as a lowly cook for a well known national pizza chain. There was this hierarchy of management driving the main goal of profit. The company had to have that competitive drive to stay alive, so that's not all evil. When profit becomes worshiped above and beyond all else, it does turn that way.

SO... thinking back to being the guy on the bottom of the corporate ladder...some of my mangers, under monitoring from high paid area supervisors, were constantly pressured by weekly required reports of their store's profit and loss. They did anything they had to, to show acceptable numbers each week. It was the same driving concept as big builders today, or any large organization; they were always driven to cut costs and make more money. No amount was ever quite enough.

Getting back... I was at the last stage of the company's product, making pizzas, and to a large extent quality control fell down into my hands. I could make really fast pizzas with most toppings piled in the middle, and short the toppings to help very tight food cost constraints to help the manger's weekly report. I could push the pizza down the chain oven a bit so it would come out a little faster, and I knew that most management would usually be satisfied with this. Some expected it.

But I thought differently about that. Whoever ordered a pizza, though faceless to me, and though they were among hundreds of orders, were each still real human beings. It was a simple concept. Make each order as if it was for you or your mom, or someone you cared about.

When I order a pizza from that same chain now, I once worked for, most of the time I see all the toppings mostly piled in the center, the dough under cooked because they pushed it down the oven, and I know exactly what happened and why. So I seldom order from that chain here. What's so stupid in all that is, I would pay the five cents or less they saved in labor rushing my order, and the five cents they saved shorting my toppings, just to have a pizza made right. I think most people would, if given the choice.

Now I know a home isn't exactly like a pizza. Most of us have gotten a lousy pizzas before, and if you know their formula, you have to wonder why. Why do they drop the ball at the very last stage of production? Why doesn't that guy in the suit at the big corporate head office know that just pounding his fist and demanding more profits by doing whatever it takes, can come down to those presumably unimportant people at the very end of the line who actually make the product? It can actually hurt the product.

That's the catch with builders, why some of us love to hate them. They do know all too well where their products fails their customers. And thus we have binding arbitration, tort reform, SLAPP suits, gag orders....
They can make homes right very easily for the over inflated value they're given these days. But they very deliberately set up a system that lets quality come down to either random chance. or to a place where it doesn't matter at all.

Another analogy: If most big builders applied their current quality standards to the commercial aircraft industry, planes would crash every day of the year. It would always be on the news, at least until the news got bored with it. It wouldn't even be safe to go near an airport, for parts falling from the sky.

Commercial aircraft are at least 1000 times more complex than any tract housing project. The profit margins on housing is probably higher than on commercial aircraft. Where the real difference comes in is, the commercial aircraft industry is held accountable to very high quality standards, because crashes are disastrous. While defective homes don't cause the level of calamity plane crashes do, for a home owner victim, it is nothing less than a disaster to get nailed with a seriously defective home.  It is not so much to ask that builders be held to reasonable accountability. Just because a home doesn't fly, is no excuse to not make it safe on the ground it's built.