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Carmela's Blog
Thea's Blog
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New Construction
The Denver area has been experiencing a new-home construction
"boom" since the early 1990's. The rapid rate of construction,
however creates many opportunities for construction errors and deficiencies to
occur.
- Builders are having trouble finding quality subcontractors to
accommodate their construction volume.
- Subcontractors are having trouble finding reliable, qualified
laborers. Many laborers are sent to the site without sufficient training
and receive little supervision on the job.
- Subcontractors are frequently pressured into difficult production
schedules to meet the builder's intensive closing schedules.
- Builders' site superintendents have two primary job functions:
(1) monitoring for quality control and (2) scheduling of subcontractors.
However, the pace of construction has resulted in superintendents having to
spend the majority of their time scheduling, leaving little time for quality
control.
- Site superintendents are overworked and underpaid. The pay
scale for superintendents hasn't changed much over the last 10-15 years, and
builders haven't added enough assistants to aid the superintendents in dealing
with the increased volume.
- Building Inspectors from the local building departments are unable
to spend adequate time in each house, as their schedules are also overloaded.
- Once the home sale is "closed" it can be very difficult
to get warranty service out of the builder, since his/her primary attention is
on production and sales, not customer service.
If you are having a home built, you should consider having periodic
inspections during the construction process by a qualified inspector.
If you already own your new home, but are still in the warranty period, you
should consider having an "end-of-warranty" inspection to discover any
residual problems that may be the responsibility of the builder to correct.
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