Investment propertyAnother Warning Issued About New Homes Construction
Another warning is being raised concerning the state of modern home
building, exhorting new home buyers to check, double check and triple check
construction before handing over their money.
This time the warning comes from Fine Homebuilding magazine, whose
summer issue just hit the news stands.
"Every good carpenter in America can tell you what"s going to happen
in a few years when those (new) overblown houses start to mature. They will
unravel," writes Barbara Flanagan in the "Taking Issue" section of the
magazine.
"You can almost hear the sound of nails popping, drywall tape
peeling, floors creaking, doors sticking and laminates delaminating all over
America."
Flanagan, who writes about design for The New York Times and
Metropolis, suggests -- only slightly tongue-in-cheek -- that carpenters,
handymen and repairmen will rule in the next millennia as cosmetically
gorgeous but structurally unsound homes start coming apart.
Her warning is similar to that sent out last month by H. Alan Mooney,
president of Criterium Engineers, one of the nation"s largest home inspection
companies, who is predicting construction problems on a massive scale within
the next few years -- almost all of them in new homes.
Mooney argues that in the current building boom small and medium
sized builders are under pressure to take on too many jobs and finish them
too quickly so they can get paid and move on to the next project. He also
says that with the current low employment, builders are being forced to take
on untrained workers and do not have enough trained supervisors to watch
their work.
"In most cases, pride and craftsmanship no longer prevail," Mooney
said. "A Master Builder in the 19th century tradition embodied the skills
today credited to builders, architects and engineers. Things were done for
purposes greater than "get it done fast and cheap."
Adding to the mix, says Mooney, is the lack of good quality land to build on.
"A lot of builders are making bad guesses on soils," he said in the
Spring issue of Real Estate Intelligence Report. "Ten years ago (by zoning
restriction) you couldn"t build on some of the land we"re seeing now."
Many builders "are not taking time to analyze the soils or they just
don"t know how."
In Fine Homebuilding, Flanagan points the finger at a consumer
culture that constantly demands possessions that are newer and bigger.
"Although American consumers have impeccable standards for the design
and performance of compact electronics -- PCs, CD players, camcorders --
they,ve gotten goofy about bigger things in life, like houses," she writes.
"Large houses are not large enough; buyers long for four-garage Tudors in
mansion tracts," she says, but, "To make things affordable, you have to make
them fast and shoddy."
The heroes of the next century, she predicts, will be those individuals who
are physically skilled at manual labor, who are able to rebuild sagging
floors and cracked foundations.
Writes Flanagan, "It"s a member of this dying breed of craftsman --
soft-spoken and skilled -- who will save the day."