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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tradelite who wrote (18397)	3/10/2004 11:13:40 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

From my experience in California, when you see remodel jobs covered in plastic sheeting for months, you would be amazed how often the actual problem is a home owner who has run out of money. In other words they were acting as their own general contractor and didn't estimate job costs correctly. I know one person who purchased a home four years ago and still has not moved in. For what he has done so far, in hindsight he would have been better off, by a factor of three, tearing down the existing home and building a new home. Currently in Los Angeles, the value of the house is a very small portion of the purchase price.

To: Tradelite who wrote (18397)	3/10/2004 12:46:50 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Meanwhile, I'm wondering what's going on with the vacant house near mine, where the entire yard was excavated, and the entire back of the brick house was torn completely off several months ago. Plastic sheeting has been covering the back of the house for months, and work seems to have stopped. Ah, the old contractor trick. He doesn't have time to work on your house because he's on another job but he doesn't want you to get someone else because he wants the work lined up when he finishes what he's doing. He assumes if he tells you the truth that you'll get someone else. So they come and do the first part the demo because he can hire low skilled $10/hour guys to do that part. He knows at this point you can't go out and get someone else to work on your house and you'll call and complain and threaten him, but all will be forgiven when he finally shows up to do the job. I have a friend who had a contractor do this to her in February, while she was living in the house. He torn off the back of the house, covered it with plastic and then didn't show up to finish until spring (after several sudden "deaths" in his family). Frankly I'd have been thinking about tearing off the back of his house by then. When she told me about the death in the family excuse the guy gave her, I burst out laughing and she looked at me like I was the most insensitive person in the world. I told the story to a group of my husband's friends that night at a party (who were all contractors) and they laughed like crazy, then said they'd all used the same excuse numerous times. edit: My husband works on commercial jobs, not residential and commercial jobs have one feature that most residential contracts don't, they all have high daily fines for exceeding the time estimates just so contractors can't do what I described above.