DAPHNE – A group of Baldwin County homeowners is suing D.R. Horton charging that the company defrauded buyers by selling homes that did not meet construction standards, a lawyer for the owners said.
David Sheller, is representing 61 homeowners in a lawsuit filed in Baldwin County Circuit Court under the Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Sheller said more than 100 Horton homes were examined by inspectors acting for his clients and all did not meet standards.
“We've inspected over 120 houses now, in 28 subdivisions and 100% of them have the same problems and more,” Sheller said. “The homes are advertised as gold fortified. They do not meet the gold fortified standards. They also all violate the Baldwin County building code, at least through Oct. 6, 2020.”
Homes certified as gold fortified are designed and built with reinforced windows and roofs intended to withstand hurricane force winds.
“These windows are supposed to handle a category three hurricane. At best, they will only handle a mid-level tropical storm,” Sheller said. “Over 55 miles an hour they're going to leak, and the impact rating is just not there. Because they didn't get the impact-rated windows.”
D.R. Horton did not return telephone and emailed requests for a comment on the lawsuit.
Kirk and Debbie Toth bought a D.R. Horton home in the Wingfoot subdivision in Daphne. Kirk Toth said they were told when they bought the property that the house had a certificate of occupancy showing that it had been inspected and certified that it met building code standards.
“Come to find out, there never was one issued by your own building inspectors here in Daphne,” Kirk Toth told Daphne City Council members at a recent meeting. “They said there never was and there isn’t one, nor was there ever one.”
He said the day after they bought the house, they went to house and found standing water in the garage and bedroom.
“We’ve been working with this for four and a half months now and every time it rains, we have to go there and sop up this water and wring out the towels and dry them out and D.R. Horton just ignores us. There’s just nothing there to do,” he said. “So, we have a house, we bought with our hard-earned money that doesn’t have a certificate of occupancy.”
Debbie Toth said D.R. Horton representatives will no longer return their calls. She said she has lived in Daphne for 30 years.
“My children live here. I raised my kids in Daphne,” she said. “It is my home and now I don’t have a home, because D.R. Horton is destroying it. They will not do anything for us.”
Sheller said other problems found in D.R. Horton homes include mold from leaks, heating and air conditioner malfunctions and improperly built foundations.
So, there're 4,500 homes plus in this town and they all have, we think they all have these issues and the brick ones, the houses that are brick also had big problems,” Sheller said. “So, these guys have consistently done a bad job for everybody.”
Sheller said his clients will ask a judge to order the company to stop construction of homes on Baldwin County.
We're going to move for an injunction to shut them down because they're continuing to violate building codes with impunity there's not enough building inspectors to go around and they know when they're coming. We know the foundations are bad,” he said. “Everyone we checked, we haven't checked as many of the foundations, the mesh I mean, they don't do the site prep work on the foundations at all almost.”
