this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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"House from Hell" — How America’s Largest Homebuilders Shift the Cost of Shoddy Construction to Buyers (hntrbrk.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Pro@reddthat.com to c/news@lemmy.world
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Cover Photo.

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!”

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Several people have told me I should sue the builder, and I probably should, but I’d have to pay for a lawyer, and it would probably take months and months.

IANAL, but I'm wondering if for your situation you'd have more success with a whole string of Small Claims court. A quick Google search for your area says this:

"You can ask for up to $25,000 in most small claims actions in the Tennessee General Sessions Court."

I'm betting nearly every one of your findings and fixes you had to pay for would be under that. There's no lawyer needed to file them, as you can do them yourself, and for the builder to have to defend it, they'll have to send their expensive lawyer to each court proceeding. If they don't show, you could get a default judgment and just win outright with no battle for the legal judgment. Now, collecting may be a different problem though. You could keep one claim going all the time so you don't have to do them all at once (and make it worth it for them to put a billable lawyer on it".

June:

TheDemonBuer v. DR Horton - civil suit from breach of contract "missing attic insulation" claim of $12,485

August:

TheDemonBuer v. DR Horton - civil suit from breach of contract "missing main drain connection" claim of $7,434

etc.

If you string this out long enough, one of two things will happen:

  • You'll eventually get paid for all the fixes you needed to begin with that you paid out-of-pocket
  • DR Horton will actually show back up and say "fine, show us what's actually broken and we'll give you one single large check to go away"