TO SUPPORT A MEANINGFUL, LONG TERM SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM
OF THE UNREGULATED HOME BUILDING INDUSTRY. TO ENCOURAGE STRICT
REGULATION AND STANDARDS ON THE LOCAL, STATE AND NATIONAL LEVELS. TO
PROMOTE AND SUPPORT CONSUMER PROTECTION AND THE PASSAGE OF THE HOME LEMON
LAW THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY.
James Burgess paid $285,000 for a house that exhibits almost
all of the most common flaws vexing new homeowners in greater
Orlando.
Like 61 percent of the owners of Central Florida houses built
in 2001, he has lived with cracked walls, floors and decking.
He had complaints about air conditioning (49 percent); roof
and window problems (more than 50 percent); continual puddles
in his yard (18 percent); and an unanchored toilet that seeps
water (13 percent).
Not to mention shoddy workmanship of the sort that turned up
in nearly four out of five houses. He even had two unique
flaws: a balcony that could fall and an open, 2-by-4-foot
trench in the concrete pad that had been filled with trash and
covered with carpet.
"If I had no problems, I would love this house," said Burgess,
a 55-year-old retired firefighter. Instead, he said, the past
two years have been filled with fights with his builder about
repairs.
Burgess owns what could be the poster house for a yearlong
investigation of new-home construction in Central Florida by
the Orlando Sentinel and WESH-NewsChannel 2.
The reporting included the first-ever statistically valid
assessment of construction quality in Florida and perhaps the
nation: inspections of 406 homes randomly selected from the
nearly 18,000 homes built in the region during 2001. Burgess'
home in Kissimmee was one of them.
Those examinations turned up literally thousands of problems,
an average of 7.5 per house. They dramatically underscored the
systemic problems in the region's residential-construction
industry -- homes being built too fast, with not enough
skilled workers or oversight -- that almost assure a buyer
will encounter quality problems in a new house.
In general, builders refused requests for interviews,
contending through spokesmen that they would not be treated
fairly. They also argued that many of the problems were minor
maintenance matters a homeowner could and should remedy.
Serious, legitimate flaws, the builders said, are handled
promptly.
The Sentinel/WESH survey, as well as interviews with
more than 100 homeowners, found many examples of builders
returning to make repairs during the typical one-year warranty
period. But in most cases, owners said that getting the work
done was a difficult and time-consuming process -- and left
them wondering how their homes would hold up as they age.
"It's really scary," Burgess said, "when you see your house
falling down around you."
The Sentinel/WESH investigation found:
A shortage of the skilled workers needed to hammer the
nails, set the block and lay the roof shingles. That has
opened opportunities for thousands of self-taught carpenters
and masons and roofers -- and has lured thousands of
undocumented migrants from Mexico to work construction here.
Mexicans now constitute a majority of the region's
residential-construction workers.
"You get what comes off the streets. They learn on the job,"
said Tom Lagomarsino, executive director of the Home Builders
Association of Metro Orlando.
A building code requiring that city and county inspectors
examine only the structural integrity and safety of the home
they are hired to check. The code prohibits them from checking
the quality of work or craftsmanship of a house -- the very
aspects that owners value so highly and that many assume the
inspectors are reviewing.
"The truth is you can have some things that aren't very nice,
but they meet the code," said Larry Goldman, Seminole County's
chief building official.
Building inspectors who -- like the contractors whose work
they are supposed to check -- are often overworked and
uncritical. Sentinel/WESH reporters found numerous
examples of inspectors checking 60 houses a day -- triple
what's considered a reasonable workload. One inspector in Lake
County approves more than 99 percent of his inspections the
first time; for Osceola County, the average for its inspectors
is 94 percent.
"You can't get away from the fact that they are not taking as
much time as they should. You can't run away from that," said
Mike Rhodes, Orlando's chief building official.
'Concerned about quantity'
Production, or tract, companies built nearly 80percent of the
houses in the computerized study -- at least 312 -- including
the one Burgess bought.
The remaining 94 were built by a variety of companies, many of
them custom builders, which typically are local businesses
that construct fewer -- but more costly -- houses. Generally,
custom homes had the same problems as production houses. But
there were not enough custom homes in the database to draw
statistically valid conclusions.
Complaints about shoddy construction, particularly by
production builders, do not surprise Ron Resch, a veteran
private building inspector, former general contractor and paid
consultant to the Sentinel and WESH.
"They're not concerned about quality; they're concerned about
quantity," he said.
With the exception of Pringle Development, which builds
"active retirement" communities in Lake County, the top
production builders in the Sentinel/WESH survey
declined repeated requests for comment, as did other builders
mentioned in this story.
Those builders, through a spokesman, questioned the validity
of the inspections because they were not conducted by
professionals, but by industrial-engineering students at the
University of Central Florida. The students were trained and
supervised by Resch and two UCF professors who research
quality and process issues for manufacturers of home
components in the Mid-Atlantic states.
Alex Hannigan, president of the Home Builders Association of
Metro Orlando and himself a custom builder, acknowledged that
production builders -- some of which build hundreds of homes
each year in the Central Florida market -- can have
quality-control problems. But he said they're not deliberate.
"I don't think they're out there to say, 'Listen, let's see
how we can screw a homeowner,'" Hannigan said. "I think it's
something that's falling through the cracks. I can't believe
that their corporate philosophy is, 'Let's see what we can get
away with.'"
Alan Parrow, Pringle Development's director of marketing,
sales and design, said his company works hard at constructing
a well-built house and reacts promptly when a homeowner
complains.
"We're proud of what we do," he said. Resch and other critics
say the production builders, as well as many custom builders,
are overwhelmed by demand sparked by Central Florida's growth
and low interest rates. In 2001 alone, about 18,000 new homes
were built in the six-county Central Florida region; this
year, as many as 23,000 are projected to be built.
With a largely unskilled work force that is rushing to keep
pace, the builders make continual mistakes.
"It's 'Hurry up and get this done. Don't worry about what it
looks like,'" Resch said.
That explanation sounds plausible to Burgess, who lived in
LaBelle in South Florida with his family while their house was
being built and was unable to check its progress very often.
One of the times he did visit, however, he saw the
2-foot-by-4-foot-by-5-inch-deep trench in the concrete pad,
running from the dining room to the kitchen. It was chiseled
into the pad, Burgess said, because electrical wires initially
were misplaced and had to be rerouted.
He asked that it be filled in before he, his wife and three
children moved in during November 2001 -- and was told it
would be taken care of.
Trench full of trash
It was not. After Burgess moved in, he pulled up the carpet
and the foam pad beneath it to see whether the repairs had
been made, and saw the trench was filled with wadded-up
cigarette packs, discarded butts and crushed aluminum cans.
He called his builder, U.S. Home, for repairs, triggering a
drawn-out series of warranty requests that continue to this
day. The builder, he said, did not get really serious about
his problems until June, when he told it that an inspector
from the Sentinel/WESH was going to look at the house in the
Hawk's Nest subdivision.
The trench -- now filled with a concretelike material -- was
one of the less significant flaws he encountered with the
house.
More worrisome to him have been the roof and window leaks; two
upstairs toilets that dripped water and damaged the ceilings
in two first-floor rooms; varying temperatures in his
second-floor bedrooms; and cracking stucco on his second
story.
All those issues, except the stucco, have been repaired or
soon will be, he said. The stucco is so thinly and badly
applied that it is falling off in small chunks, largely around
a crack running along one side of the house that starts as a
hairline but widens enough to hold two quarters.
Burgess fears that much of the stucco may come off eventually,
as he said happened to the house next door. An attempted fix
of the neighbor's house has languished for more than four
months, with much of one wall still swathed in plastic wrap.
U.S. Home has not yet offered Burgess a plan for what will be
done for him.
But the builder has, he said, pledged to put new support beams
under the balcony that opens off of his second-floor master
bedroom. The original beams are cracked, and an independent
inspector hired by U.S. Home recommended they be replaced for
fear the balcony might collapse if too many people stood on
it.
The builder also put extra drains in his neighborhood to
reduce the constant puddling, Burgess said. The work has
helped, but he said his yard and many others in the
subdivision remain almost constantly wet.
Kim Mulligan has faced some of the same problems that plague
Burgess. But she's satisfied that her builder -- Morrison
Homes -- has addressed the flaws in her $269,000 house in
Heathrow in Seminole County.
Her roof sprang a leak earlier this year in a bad storm,
staining a corner of her living room. Morrison has plugged it
and soon will repair the interior damage as well, said
Mulligan, 43, a medical/legal consultant.
"They've lived up to their promises," Mulligan said of
Morrison, "but it's just disturbing when you have a new house
and you have a roof leak."
She also has had plenty of cracking of her exterior walls and
a large crack in her garage floor. Again, Morrison has filled,
caulked or painted over the flaws, she said.
Mulligan's biggest concern now is that some of the nails that
were hammered into the drywall are popping out. She thinks the
house is settling, or shifting, as the ground adjusts to the
weight of the concrete pad.
Thomas Fisher's foundation seems OK; it's the interior finish
of his $277,000 house in Waterford Lakes that upsets him. Some
walls are not flat, a fact he learned when he tried to install
chair rails in the dining room.
He wanted to glue the rails on, but the gap was too big in
some areas because of the wall's "wavy" undulations. He
resorted to screwing them into the metal studs.
Fisher, a 63-year-old retired steel-plant manager, found one
advantage to uneven walls. He figured he would have to drill
holes in the wall to run the wires and plugs that connect and
power his entertainment equipment from one shelf to the next.
But the "waves" were so pronounced, he said, he could slip
everything in the space between the shelves and the walls of
his Centex home.
"There's no quality control exercised at all," he said.
Inspector: Workers lack pride
Alan Mooney, president of Criterium Engineers, a national
home-inspection company, hears such criticisms and his
employees see similar flaws all the time, locally and
nationally.
He blames much of the sloppy work on the loss of personal
pride by many workers and the "good enough" attitude of many
builders.
Usually, Mooney said, no one is on the job at a house from
beginning to end. Even job superintendents, particularly for
production builders, come and go, meaning the person in charge
of overseeing construction of a house can change several times
before completion.
And the workers come in only for a specified task -- framing
or building block walls, for instance -- then leave.
"Good work or bad, individual effort mostly goes unnoticed,"
said Mooney, whose company operates in Central Florida.
Rushed builders also tend to set lower standards, he said. So
if a corner is not perfectly square or a wall is a little out
of line, he said, it becomes "good enough."
That attitude could lie behind many of the discoveries in the
Sentinel/WESH survey, particularly when it comes to the final
look and feel of a house. Some findings:
More than 40 percent of the homes had walls and ceilings
that were not straight, had waves in them, were cracked or had
drywall nails popping out.
Bill Braun, a 64-year-old disabled electrician, has drywall in
his $143,000 house in DeBary that was not completely hammered
into the wood framing behind it. He can push the drywall in
more than an inch and watch it spring back.
"Isn't that something?" he said.
Seventeen percent of the houses had cabinet shelves
missing the middle supports. That can cause the shelves to sag
and even break over time.
"It concerns me," said Jay Miller, a 42-year-old
computer-project engineer. "It's one of those things that
should have been done."
He spent $320,000 for his custom house in Winter Garden. The
holes for the support pegs are missing for two long shelves in
the kitchen, Miller said, but he figures they are strong
enough to hold the items placed there.
Fifty-two houses had toilets that weren't anchored
properly or leaked, just like Burgess'.
"It's pretty bad," said Alberto Sabat, a 45-year-old
immigration agent.
Sabat, who paid $117,000 for his house near Kissimmee, said
his builder went out of business, leaving him to fix the
toilet and lots of other flaws, including soffits that were
falling off, a cracked garage floor and driveway and no
insulation in the attic.
"There's nothing critical," he said, "but it's just a lot of
stuff."
An additional 26 houses did not have the stoves attached
to the wall, meaning they could tip over accidentally. That is
an apparent code violation.
Ron Ozut, whose grandchildren occasionally visit his $150,000
house in Clermont, said he intends to call the builder, Levitt
and Sons, to secure his stove to the wall.
"I'll get it done," said Ozut, a retired postal clerk.
Fifteen homes had carpet that was fraying or lumpy or
coming up in the corners.
The effect of all these problems -- big and small -- is not
that houses all over Central Florida soon will collapse, but
that they will wear poorly over time.
Without repairs, they will look shabby within a few years and,
in some instances, even sag.
Such homes, experts say, will not increase as much in value
over time and cost the owners more than a well-constructed
house in upkeep and replacement expenses.
"I think they are throwing these things up," said Sharon
McLearn, a Winter Park Realtor. "There is no pride. That day
is gone."
Dan Tracy can be reached at 407-872-7200, Category 5483, or
dtracy@orlandosentinel.com.
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