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You’re in what you thought would be your dream house — until it wasn’t.
The living room ceiling has been ripped out after sewage water backed up and flooded the upstairs bathroom. With the drywall gone, you can spot loose nails and concerning gaps between the floor joists. Rainwater seeps through the cracks around the front door.
Insects crawl through the window frames — even though the windows were reinstalled because they weren’t installed properly in the first place. And most of your bathrooms are unusable, awaiting repairs the builder promised more than a year ago.
It feels like a nightmare — but it’s reality, according to Danielle Antonucci, who invited a Hunterbrook Media reporter to the home she and her husband bought just four years ago in Sarasota, Florida, built by the nation’s largest homebuilder, D.R. Horton ($DHI). In an email provided to Hunterbrook, Antonucci desperately pleaded with D.R. Horton to address the numerous defects rendering their home nearly uninhabitable: “I keep getting the response that this matter has been escalated to the Sarasota office,” she wrote. “It has been 21 months!”
We as a society did not forget how to build good houses, write good software, design good vehicles, or anything like that.
We just stopped caring about it because the core purpose for any business is to increase revenue, decrease costs, grow, and absorb market share (exceptions being niche and boutique places that price accordingly). And may of us as individuals think we should run our own finances in a similar way.
For instance, let’s say I can build 100 shitty crooked houses with the cheapest and non-background-checked workers, with the same time and money invested that it takes you to build 50 beautifully crafted and solid homes with your team of experienced carpenters. I can sell my shitty homes for 20% less than you since the home buyers are also mostly shopping on price and stats, then I am going to win and once you’re out of business I will be building 150 shitty crooked houses at a time.