My wife I purchased a Pulte home in 2000. We followed all of the normal procedures for purchasing a home including, having the home inspected. We used well known agents for our purchase. This Pulte home was built in 1996 and seemed fine to us..Until!
Almost immediately after we moved in I noticed the exterior siding looked weird.
There were obvious sections of the house that looked under cut or seemed to be separating from the trim or the Eve vents but mostly the butt Joints. ( Keep in mind that I am not the average consumer and did some research on the type of material and installation requirement for the siding after I noted the problem.) Of coarse I was dismayed to find that there was a class action lawsuit against Weyerhaeser company because Pulte used it on many of the homes they built and left many home owners holding the bag! I should have paid better attention!
Pulte's 10 year warranty:
Initially I called my Pulte Rep who at the time was Mr. Ron Brow. Ron came to my house on several occasions and basically told me off the record that I would be taken care of and this was Pulte's fault. Ron No longer works for the company.
After many months of delays and no responses from Pulte I filled out paper work sent to me by an independent Claims Administrator so that I could file for siding damage. Long story short, I had two inspectors come out and I received a binding award for 450 dollars.
Fast forward.. 2006. My own insurance company looked at the house and basically stated in a letter that " The Damage to the siding is due to construction and/or material defect" I was also informed that because if the issues I may now lose some of my coverage.
After a while
I was sent some new class action documents from a a law firm out of Southern California.. Verboon, Milstien and Peter. This Law group was supposedly going after Pulte for Latent defects. I thought this is great! I have another shot at Justice!
Right!
After I filled out all the paper work and signed on to be one of the many neighbors WHO decided to sue Pulte for screwing over this development I had an idea.. I called my new Pulte Rep Mr.Tony McCarthy to try one last time to get Pulte at least fix some of the damage around the windows on the east side of my home. At this point I figured this lawsuit will drag on for years and maybe just maybe if they knew that I was only complaining about this one issue that they would be better off handling it directly rather than have one more Class action to deal with. Addition I considered the cost of repair will include Mold, dry rot, Structural damage!
Pulte agreed to come out and re look at the issue on one condition. I needed to drop off the class action and provide documentation proving it. I did this out of desperation.
To Sum up this nightmare. Pulte Denied any responsibility for the siding issue, I am out of the class action, The city inspector claims the house passed framing inspection, My house is rotting away and I am about to sign on to have the siding replaced with Certainteed Cement siding for 40 k or so..
Joe
Brentwood, California