The Residential Real Estate Crash Index Message Board

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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index

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To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (18448)	3/11/2004 10:42:38 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) of 306849

Well, I've heard every kind of story, being married to a commercial contractor, but that's the first time I've heard of a fraudulent bond. For sure damages can exceed the face value of the bond. My electrician at the studio told me about working on a commercial job where one of his workers cut off all the phone systems for a high rise office building by whacking a cable that happened to be sticking out where they needed to put something. CA has much more stringent laws protecting home owners from fraud by home improvement contractors. I once had the occasion to swap stories with a Maryland State home improvement commissioner, he said his most frequent call is when a homeowner gets sold a ladder. This is when a painter shows up with a ladder and tarps, gets a third payment up front for the paint job and then disappears completely. My husband is fond of saying that the other end of a paint can opener is a bottle opener. How I got talking to the home improvement commissioner is a long painful story which ended with me getting a City zoning violation officer together with him after seven months of looking at a pile of rubble where cement steps where suppose to be. One saying I had to take care of the situation immediately and the other saying I couldn't touch it until our complaint was resolved. All my friends were incredulous that a pro like my husband could wind up getting ripped off by a contractor, somehow they thought he had a better chance than they did. For the most part that is true, but there are some blatantly crooked and incompetent people in home improvement and if you hire enough people sooner or later you are going to run into one of them. This partially explains why he and I were laying cement blocks ourselves on a Saturday a few years later. For a guy who routinely runs 70 guys on a project, he has an overwhelming reluctance to hire even one to do something on our house. So I've learned to do some things I really had zero interest in learning.

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