5. "Your warranty may be worthless."
Many home builders tout 10-year warranties as protection against future problems. But these warranties are often extremely limited in coverage, particularly after the second year. "It gives people a false sense of security," says Brent Lemon, a Dallas attorney who represents homebuyers. "Most of these [warranties] basically require that the house fall down on top of you before they kick in."

Consider the warranty offered by Aurora, Colo.-based Home Buyers Warranty. It lists 34 exclusions and, like many warranties, states that the home must be "unsafe, unsanitary or otherwise unlivable" to get structural-defect coverage. Anne Stark, a Dallas attorney specializing in homebuyer complaints, did a review in the early 1990s of three years' worth of Home Buyers Warranty's structural-defect claims and found that 80 percent had been denied. Em Fluhr, the warranty company's president, says, "If [homebuyers] detect any worsening of the situation, they can submit another claim."

Accepting a builder's warranty could actually do you harm. Many states, through case law, recognize implied warranties based on industry standards that provide more protection, says Lemon. Some builders' warranties usurp that

6. "You'll never see me once you move in."
It's one of the great ironies of building a house: During construction, you can't wait to have the builder out of your sight. But once the work is done and problems crop up, he's nowhere to be found. "One of the biggest problems is that once the home is built, you can't find the builder with a Texas posse," says Clark.

Denise Burton knows all about it. Even before she and her husband closed on their $205,000 Glendale, Ariz., home in September 1997, they knew there were problems. Their walls weren't plumb, for example, and there was no framing behind one. Worried about losing their low interest rate, they moved in anyway, with a promise from the builder, Diamond Key Homes, that everything would be fixed once they got in. It didn't happen. Burton made at least a dozen calls to the Phoenix-based builder over a four-month period and sent letters and faxes. Mostly, she was ignored. And when the builder did send workers out to her house, says Burton, "they'd make it worse." It wasn't until October 1998 that the builder finally made all the proper fixes. And that was only after the state agency that regulates contractors, acting on Burton's complaint, temporarily revoked
Duanibd Det's license. Diamond Key declined to comment.

7. "Good luck suing me."
Buried in nearly every home-purchase contract is a clause that reads something like this: "Any dispute that arises between the builder and the purchaser will be decided in binding arbitration." Most buyers sign on the dotted line, not knowing that they have just waived their right to take their builder to court. "Arbitration is being sneaked into those contracts, and nobody knows what it means until it's too late," says Dennis K. Drake, a San Antonio attorney who represents homebuyers.

What's wrong with arbitration? Well, for starters, arbitrators are less likely than juries to award treble damages, say construction-industry attorneys. Also, arbitration is more costly, believe it or not, than taking a case to court. First there's the filing fee, which, for a homebuyer's claim of $50,000 to $100,000, is $1,250, if administered through the American Arbitration Association. Plus, there's a hearing fee of $150 per day; an arbitrator fee, which usually runs $750 to $2,000 per day (usually split between the parties); and you still have to pay a lawyer because smaller awards mean that it's tough to find attorneys who will work on a contingency basis. The result? "It's so prohibitively expensive that consumers may find they just don't want to pursue a claim," says Drake.

Jim Blackstone found out just how expensive. Soon after he and his wife bought a $165,000 home in Moore, S.C., from Pulte Homes, he came across leaks in his basement and crawl space, cracks in his fireplace and a load-bearing wall built on gravel. When the company didn't fix the problems to his satisfaction, he went to arbitration. In May he was awarded $31,700, much less than the $174,000 he sought. The judgment barely covered the $30,000 he estimates he spent fighting the case. "That's more than he deserves," Bob deHoll, an attorney for Pulte, says of what Blackstone got. "We offered to come back and fix the problems several times."

8. "Your home won't look like the ones we toured."
It's easy to be impressed with the model home your builder shows you. Who wouldn't love the lush curtains and intricate crown moldings? Too bad the house you buy will look nothing like the model.

Few decorative touches are standard, and builders are notorious for using sneaky design tricks to make models more attractive, such as putting in scaled-down furniture to make a room look bigger. Maria Lo Bianco, a buyers' broker in Springfield, Va., admits to playing this game in her previous job as a builder's marketing executive. "If I know it's a small foyer," she says, "my challenge is to get the buyer's eye off it so he has no idea how small it is — until he goes to settlement and can't fit his furniture. If the dining room is visible from the foyer, I might do an exotic color design there and leave the foyer plain."

Some practices are flat-out deceitful. Often, builders will plant grass where the driveway would go to make the lawn look bigger, says Alan Fields, who co-authored Your New House (Windsor Peak Press), a guide to buying a home. "If you think you're getting the model home," advises Tim Carter, a builder and syndicated columnist, "you'd better be writing down language in the contract that says it's going to be exactly like the model."

9. "I haven't budgeted enough for decent light fixtures."
It sounds like a reasonable practice. Rather than specifying every item for the house, a builder will set cost allowances for things such as light fixtures or carpeting. That way the buyer gets to pick out what he wants. The trouble is, many builders use allowances as a bidding strategy, low-balling the cost to keep the total price down and land the contract.

When author Fields and his wife bought their house in 1990, their builder gave them a $500 allowance for all their light fixtures. "We walked into the store and were just floored by the prices," he recalls. The couple shopped for discounts, but still had to spend $1,000. Jones, the Memphis builder, says low-ball allowances are common in his region. He says they usually range from $450 to $600 for light fixtures in three-bedroom houses when the real bill is more than double that. "And that's for cookie-cutter fixtures," he adds.