Fox Ridge built our house six years ago. We are the original homeowners. We put the house on the market in March.in July, we received a contract on our house and prepared to move out the beginning of August. When our buyer had the house inspected, the inspection revealed a significant crack in the house's foundation.
Initially, we were not really worried because we knew we had a 10 year structural warranty on the house. We contacted Fox Ridge and were referred to Quality Builders Warranty (QBW), who handles the warranties after the first two years. When we contacted QBW, they told us they didn't know who Fox Ridge was and that the contact we had been given no longer worked there. It took an entire day to get that straightened out; finally, QBW owned up to warranting Fox Ridge Homes and they gave us the address to send the report.
We received a fairly quick response (about a week later): claim denied. They provided us with additional forms to fill out if we disagreed with the assessment. We filled those out and sent them in.
In the meantime, we had two contractors look at the house to give us an estimate on what needed to be fixed and how much it would cost. The contractors showed us that the lot had never been graded properly (a mistake made by Fox Ridge in building the house) and the resulting drainage from a large hill in our backyard was running into the foundation of the house, causing it to bow in and crack. The same problem is also causing the deck to fall over as the drainage pushes on the deck's support posts.
The contractors also pointed out that Fox Ridge was aware of the potential for a problem because they had support piers installed as additional fortification against the hill; that was a good move, except we were never notified of the potential for a problem with drainage during the entire building process of our house. From our understanding of real estate law, disclosure is extremely important; nothing was ever disclosed to us.
Meanwhile, we had also been trying to contact someone at Fox Ridge to come and look at the problem. The Customer Service Manager (who NEVER answers his phone and only occasionally returns calls from messages left) finally agreed to come out & look at the property. He agreed that there was a big problem with the foundation and assured us he would contact the warranty company immediately on our behalf. He never did this; in fact, after their "final" denial of our claim, the warranty company told us that Fox Ridge denied ever sending anyone out to look at our house.
The warranty company's structural engineer also examined the foundation, acknowledged the crack (it runs the entire length of the house and is pretty hard to ignore) and the grading problem, but stated in his report that there was not "major structural damage" because the problem did not make the house "unsafe or unlivable."
Apparently, the warranty company is banking on the hope that by the time the house becomes unsafe or unlivable, the warranty will have expired. The house will be both unsafe and unlivable in a few years if the foundation blocks continue their rate of separation; one of the contractors said the house will eventually "fall over". At this point, it's just unsellable; the contract on our house fell through because the buyer lost confidence in the builder, then a second contract fell through for the same reason.
We sent a letter to the president of Fox Ridge and got a response from the same Customer Service Manager we dealt with before (at least that letter got him to call us back - 2 weeks of calls went unreturned). Fox Ridge admitted that the warranty company "never pays out" unless the house is literally falling down.in fact, they stated that they have only known the warranty to pay out twice. They also made the comment to us that "foundations crack" and that if we were responsible homeowners, we should have been checking our foundation on a regular basis.
Basically, they wouldn't own up to making a mistake and put the burden back on us. Our position is that it's not normal for a six year old house to have structural damage, and if we're supposedly covered by a warranty, the problem should be fixed. Apparently, we're wrong.
So, the bottom line is that Fox Ridge messed up in the building of our house, which resulted in our being unable to sell our six year old home without extensive repair work. Then, the same company that touts "quality" on its website and sales literature refused to help us in fixing the mistake they made. Obviously, we're extremely dissatisfied with Fox Ridge and STRONGLY encourage people to choose another builder for their home.
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