In 2004 we lost everything to hurricane Ivan and contracted Darwin Construction to build a new house. At the closing the price of construction was $35,000 more than the agreed upon amount, at which point I stood up at the closing and said sorry no, this was not what we agreed and I only have exactly what funding we agreed on to build with. Their Real Estate Agent, (who received $6,000 at the closing, and I still know not why), the owners, the title agent, and the SBA who I got the mortgage through all said not to worry about it when the house is finished you can secure the rest of the money. Wrong.
They began construction and the nightmare got worse, I handed them $60,000 up front before construction started and they took 2 months to start. Then I gave them another $60,000, and construction stopped. The construction crew that was building my house dissapeared and no work was done for 6 months, the house was framed in, with broken windows and liens from suppliers mind you, and work stopped. Several times the owners wife tried to get us to back out of the contract, and when her supervisor left the company I found they were trying to steal the house from under us by getting us to let them buy the contract back so they could own the house and we would be out again with nothing.
After 6 months I hired a Real Estate Attorney and then the company finshed construction, crappy, 5 months late with us doing the walk through the last week in December. At the walk through we did the checkoff with the list of problems and basically we were told they were not going to honor the warranty and fix anything. Then they charged us both a late fee and interest on the construction remainder amount that they changed way back at the closing. Legally, it can only be one or the other, state law says that a late fee is considered interest in construction cases.
The crux of it was that they knew we could not get a second construction loan, it is not possible period, and they would not finish the house so that we could get a second mortgage to pay the remaining $23,000, (We returned all of our new household goods to recover part of the money).
In the end we found that they had been planning to keep the house from the start, and OH by the way, the DPBR told us that it was a personal case, not an affair for wrongfull business practice in their jusrisdiction, that we should file a civil suit. So they said we were right but they would not do anything. The whole time the company never provided disclosure or proof of building or anything, we even had personal liens on our house that were not satisfied till the day we did our walk-through.
The company has since gone out of business, but I am sure they will resurface as another named company before long, and I found it to be useless to pursue a legal case since the repair amount is not worth anyone's time here due to all the rebuilding going on to this day, and the fact that they are being sued by 6 supplier companies to boot.
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