Homeowners wage battle with builder
Come to the homes of Cynthia Daugherty and Susan Sabin and you’ll notice the lemons. But the Christmas-like display is meant to make a not-so-joyous point — both women believe their recently built homes are lemons. Since Daugherty and Sabin bought their homes last year, they say, the foundation walls and floors have begun to crack in several locations. Both homeowners maintain they were sold defective houses and are calling for the developer to buy them back. And they are taking extraordinary measures to force the issue. “Pulte Homes should not be allowed to build any more homes in this city until they buy back my worthless piece of junk,” Daugherty told the council.

Not So Impressive Pulte Model Home
When potential buyers ask the sales agents what is going on with that particular model, agents reply, "It is undergoing routine maintenance."  Routine maintenance?  Chain link fence with black tarps installed around home during the process to conceal foundation repairs. See Pulte Featured Model Home

Couple site moldy home, fraud in suit vs. developer
Alexander Kaplan and his wife, Denise, are suing DiVosta Homes and VillageWalk of Bonita Springs Homeowners Association over numerous problems associated with a four-bedroom home on Scrub Jay Lane that they closed on in April 2006, but have never lived in due to the problems...Attorneys Christopher Burrows and Scott Grant, who represent DiVosta, referred calls to Beth Cocchiarella, a spokeswoman for DiVosta’s parent company Pulte Homes... A 2003 report by New York-based Insurance Information Institute estimated that more than 10,000 mold-related injury lawsuits were pending nationwide that year, a 300 percent increase since 1999.

Call For Action: Pulte Home Sales
Kansas City - Mayors and Pulte homeowners are call Pulte Homes with questions about its sale of 10% of its empty lots in two different developments...  We thought it would be  completely Pulte when we moved in.  I didn't even know it was possible to sell to other builders...  See video report

Builder's test finds high levels of arsenic at Wellington project
In preliminary testing Centex Homes has found high levels of arsenic contamination in the groundwater and some arsenic contamination in the soil of its Oakmont Estates project, according to a report released by state environmental officials on Friday.Testing done by Earth Tech in Orlando found arsenic in the groundwater at up to 16 times the state's safe level, said Stephen Webster, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The state's safe level is 10 parts per billion. Centex found readings as high as 160 parts per billion in the groundwater of its unfinished neighborhood off U.S. 441.

South Bay Beaches Housing Bubble 
... $3,120 a month on a high-end Fusion home. I am no financial wizard. It looks waaaaay too complicated for my taste, and I don't like prepayment penalties at all. Why all the complication? A fixed rate 150 year mortgage would be easier to understand than this gobbledygook! Show me a table of what my payment, principal, and interest are for the next umpteen years, that's what I want to see. When I studied the Centex complex, the units, and then the pictures I took, I decided it wasn't the colors that made the place seem drab to me, it was the architecture. The Centex complex strikes me as very "institutional" looking, with the units looking almost like the city tenements of 80-100 years ago.

Lenexa Woman: New House Is Falling Apart
Susan Sabin bought the house less than five months ago, and she said shortly after she moved in, she started noticing problems, such as cracks in the foundation and doors that won't shut... "It's such an accelerated rate, and the engineer told me that he didn't know what was going on with my house, but it's happening very fast," Sabin said. She said the builder, Pulte Homes, isn't helping."Warranties are only as good as what the builder will do," Sabin said.

String of arsons grows
Jeremy Taub would never have bought the newly constructed house in South Bexar County if he'd known that someone had torched three unfinished houses on the same street four months earlier...Roused by a neighbor at 3 a.m., Taub and his wife carried their 2-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son from their beds and stood in the street to watch as the flames, carried by the wind, gutted their own house...In June, residents reported seeing two cars outside a home under construction on Arkansas Oak moments before it burned down. Less than two weeks later, someone reduced two more unfinished homes on the same block to rubble. The wooden frame of Taub's soon-to-be house also was charred in that blaze, prompting the builders to knock it down and rebuild it, Maris recalled.