The housing boom of the 2000s produced a bunch of homes with shoddy construction. Now, homeowners ar

In a Center City office with a view of City Hall, attorney Jennifer Horn, of Horn Williamson, has represented several hundred homeowners against numerous builders since her construction practice started in 2015.

She alleges that builders alone should be held liable for the problems across the region.

“In an effort to get as many homes finished as quickly as possible it appears mistakes were made,” Horn said. “Based on my experience with experts, subcontractors, and builders, I believe the problem is caused primarily by inadequate architectural and construction oversight, as well as builders’ design and construction practices that failed to comply with building code.”

Consider the case of Brian and Anna Mulnix.

Like the Goldsteins, the Mulnixes moved to Bucks County in the 2000s, enticed by Toll’s Buckingham Forest development. It had the schools they were seeking. They thought Toll’s model home was “beautiful.” And with a young child and busy lives, they liked that their next home could be move-in ready.

But it was more than just appearances that convinced the Mulnixes, according to a transcript of arbitration testimony filed in Bucks County Court this year. The promise of quality assurance sealed the deal, Brian Mulnix testified.

Toll had advertised in-house architects and engineers, testimony and archives of the builder's website show. A project manager, the website said, would be on site and inside each house “once, twice, three times a day.”

“What that meant was this house should last a lifetime and more,” Brian Mulnix testified in October 2017. It implied, he said, that his house would be “built in accordance with code.”

But when the Mulnixes tried to sell their house nearly a dozen years later, they were surprised by what they found.

In the spring of 2015, a new job opportunity, beckoning Brian Mulnix to Texas, came with a hard-to-refuse offer: If they couldn’t sell their home, a relocation company would buy it.

There was just one requirement — a moisture inspection test.

At the time, the Mulnixes had seen rot around doors and some “black soot-looking staining of stucco,” Brian Mulnix testified in arbitration. But they thought nothing of it. With a little sprucing, they thought, the home they had purchased on Valentine's Day 13 years before would sell in no time.

The inspection proved otherwise: A material known as flashing — pieces of metal that are installed in critical places on a home to divert water away — was installed incorrectly or missing, allowing water to “drain directly into the stucco,” the report said. Their stucco had cracked. A crucial piece of flashing at the bottom of a wall that allows water to drain — a weep screed — was also missing in places, the report said.

“The failure to install any provision at the bottom of any of the walls was a fatalistic mistake,” according to one inspection report — one of many the Mulnixes commissioned — by Frank Hendron, a building science consultant at Northeast Inspection Corp. in Newcastle County. His 2017 evaluation “revealed systemic failures,” he said, that have occurred each year since construction.

Before the Mulnixes hired Hendron, they had reached out to Toll, asking for help after their first inspection revealed some defects.

Toll's response, he said: There was nothing the company could do to help.

In a statement, Toll said the company denied the family’s claim “because their home was outside the 10-year warranty,” as well as a Pennsylvania state law that allows homeowners to bring claims against builders within a set period of time.

Unable to sell the house, Mulnix quit his job in Texas after eight months to move back home. The couple paid $23,000 for a company to fix the most problematic parts of the home, but the fix did not work. They conducted multiple inspections and sought stucco-removal estimates. They hired Jennifer Horn and requested Toll’s help again.

When the company issued a second denial, they went to arbitration.

After seven days of testimony from the Mulnixes, Toll executives, subcontractors, and others, retired Philadelphia Judge William Manfredi found that Toll’s architectural drawings “did not comply with applicable laws and regulations.” No testing was performed prior to sale, he said. Toll had “failed to design and construct the home without defects.” And in the end, he added, there was destroyed sheathing and compromised framing … that impacts the structural integrity of the home.”

He awarded the Mulnixes $407,187.59, including more than $100,000 of attorney's fees.

Source: http://www2.philly.com/real-estate/housing/water-damage-home-construction-defects-rotting-toll-cutler-stucco-20181115.html