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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
That’s the sort of stuff that should’ve made the city refuse to issue a certificate of occupancy. Where was the building department inspector in all this‽
We live in a rural area, outside any city boundary. The county doesn’t have any building codes, and there were only a handful of state codes we had to adhere to.
I should have paid for a home inspection before we took the keys, but we were in a hurry to move in. The build took so much longer than we had planned for that the construction loan matured, went to long term, so we were paying both rent and a mortgage.