I went to Tucson this week for two closings.  One was for a house we are buying, and the other is a house my brother-in-law is buying and that I am power of attorney for since he’s out of state.  When you buy a new-build in Tucson, the way they like to arrange it is to have you come to your house for a walk-through the day of your closing.  You walk through the house with a site superintendent and create a punch list of final touch up or unfinished items that need to be completed before your loan funds a few days after closing.  At that time you will get the keys and the house is yours.  So this was the case this week.  We had a walk through for our house at 7:00 am and the closing was at 5:00 pm.  The walk for my brother-in-law’s house was at 10:00 am, and the closing was at 3:00 pm.  It would’ve been a full day except things did not turn out as planned.

The two homes were with two different builders and it was interesting to compare how two very similar situations went down.  Incidentally, we did not receive a HUD-1 to review for either of the homes.  This is normal, but unacceptable.

Today I’ll share what happened with our house.  We had the walk through at 7:00 am.  The super was there and was very enthusiastic and courteous.  He gave us a thorough orientation on every aspect of the home and knew all the answers to any question we could think of.  He was clearly very experienced in his job and in home ownership.  We all walked through every room, looked carefully in every nook and cranny, and put a piece of blue tape next to anything that needed attention.  At first we were taping minor paint touch-ups, tar on the carpet, missing stain on the banister, a loose towel rod. 

As we looked closer, there were some drywall issues.  As we looked closer, there were cracks that ran the entire length of the room.  Then there was completely exposed drywall tape that wasn’t even mudded over.  The drywall job was incredibly terrible!  We moved to the outside and the stucco was bad as well.  Several areas had been patched and the patches were completely obvious.  And then the paint over the patches did not match the original house paint.  The overall quality on this house was the worst I’ve ever seen.  We went through one and a half rolls of blue tape marking all the areas that needed attention yet.

We don’t expect the house to be perfect at this point.  It is understood that it will not be.  There are always scuffs and scrapes that need a little TLC, and maybe a burnt out lightbulb or some cracking in the grout.  But this was excessive.  The way it works is you leave this meeting with a list of punch items.  The superintendent then quickly goes to work on correcting all the defects and about 3 days later when your loan has funded, everything on the list is supposed to be finished and they give you the keys to move in.  This house had a TON of issues and several trades that needed to be brought in.  Multiple coats of drywall mud, paint, stucco removal, redo, then paint, and much more.  This super is going to be busy!

But that’s how it works if everything goes according to plan.  We decided to call the title company at one point that day before our 5:00 pm closing to verify that our closing was still going to happen.  Good thing we just so happened to call because sure enough, they had cancelled it.  I don’t know if we would’ve been called or if we would have learned this when we showed up at 5:00.  Good thing we had other business to do in Tucson that day because I would have been pretty perturbed if I would have waited around all day until 5:00 for nothing.  We were informed to wait for someone to call us in the coming days to reschedule.  Again I must ask, how do people who have jobs do this?  They don’t ever negotiate schedules.  They tell you when you need to be where, and they change it last minute regularly.

What I have come to learn with these closings is that the title company calls you and schedules a date long before anyone knows if the loan will be ready to close on that date.  Many times you get to your closing date and someone realizes that the loan is not done yet.  To the builder every day represents a holding cost and they don’t want to be done with the house a day sooner than you take over and they don’t want to be left holding the bag a day longer than they have to.

I was really disenchanted with the quality of this house.  Now I know what we saw was mostly cosmetic and can and will be fixed, but my eagle eye will be able to see the re-worked and patched drywall and stucco, I promise you.  The bigger issue to me is that I wonder how poorly the construction that I cannot see is.  I’m amazed really that they allowed the homeowner to see the home in the state it was in.  If I was spending my hard earned wages on this house and was planning to live in it, I’d be sick.  Clearly nobody was supervising the job.  I am quite surprised that they didn’t correct some of the extreme defects already.

My husband and I looked at each other in amazement each room we walked through.  At the end we commented to the super that we’ve never seen a house with this many problems and we’ve been through a lot.  His simple explanation was “we’re all a victim of our trades.”  He explained that the quality of any house is only as good as the quality of the tradesman that does each part.  I guess he as much as admitted there is very little oversight, and apparently the site superintendent is not accountable for building a quality home.  You get what you get.