We got a response from the ROC, setting a 5/4 meeting to go over the complaints.
That is a HUGE delay, but at least they are with the program.
I will post back with the results of the meeting.
To be fair, that depends on your house . If I ever had the sort of kitchen renovation that required everything to be moved out of the kitchen, the refrigerator/stove/dishwasher would be right in the middle of my living room or dining room because there isn’t enough wall space in my living room or dining room to put those things unless I move the furniture that is currently against the wall into the middle of the room. And having the china cabinet in the middle of the room is no better than having the refrigerator there. Which is why my kitchen has basically the same layout it did when I bought the house, New cabinets, new stove, new floor tiles ,new refrigerator - but not at the same time and the new stove/fridge went right where the old one was and anything that was moved into the middle of the dining room was there for a couple of days, not weeks.
A quick aside if I may. Is there no requirement that contractors set aside a customer’s downpayment for use only on that customer’s project? I find this use of one person’s money to do jobs for another person amazing.
As a lawyer, if you pay me a $10k retainer, I must set that aside in a separate trust account which I can never commingle with my personal or business funds. Only when I do work on your case can I then transfer that into my business account.
Do other professions not have such a requirement?
Never heard of such a requirement. Contractors aren’t going to have any trust accounts. That downpayment belongs to the contractor, his only obligation is to complete the job, he can do whatever he wants with the money.
Dude let it go, you are wrong. Everyone with experience on this issue is telling you that you are wrong. Why is it so weirdly important to you?
Good talk.
Did you get an answer on this? In the jurisdictions I’ve worked in the permit is the project’s, not the contractors. A homeowner is allowed to GC a project (and plumb and wire it if they wish) in most areas, although you might get slightly more exacting inspections. You should NOT have to pull a new permit (or at least pay a new fee)!
Have you found out about payments to subs and liens? That’s what I would be most afraid of. Crummy situation all around. Definitely lean on the architect!
Was the architect able to help? And I wonder if the contractor’s finances fell apart because of the emergency. Would he have been OK without it?
AFAIK, he never returned the architect’s call.
We spoke with a lawyer today, and he said that there should be no way that there was a lien placed on our house without us knowing. So, that’s good news.
We are now in limbo, waiting for the ROC to step in and do their thing.
As far as what caused the contractor to screw up - who knows? But, this started way before the COVID thing happened.
If you continue with a lawyer and the lawyer intends to contact him for any reason, I’d ask the lawyer about pushing for a lien release. Just to be safe. A lot of people don’t realize they have liens on their house until it’s time to sell. My grandparents paid for a new roof, then 20 years later, paid for it a second time to remove the lien. Grandma paid the roofer, the roofer didn’t pay the suppliers and went out of business. She had to pay the suppliers.
For the life of me, I still don’t understand why that’s legal, but it is, and it’s common, and probably a subject for a different thread.
Essentially, grandma’s house was built out of fraudulently obtained materials, and the supplier is entitled to assume she was in cahoots with the contractor. So she had the materials and the supplier hadn’t been paid, and she may probably had no way to prove that she had nothing to do with the fraud, which is kind of tough to do 20 years after the fact.
the using pauls money from a remodel to pay for the work/materials done on peters from last month is as old as building its self unless they’re lucky to have someone pay all at once…
And if the worker’s arent union bet your last dollar they’ve been ripped off too as they have to wait until payments for work to the contractor are made… in this case they’ll never hear from the guy again …
I don’t know what the Registry of Deeds (or whatever your state calls it) is like in the Scottsdale area, but most of them have gone online. It should be trivially easy to look up all filed documents related to your property. If they’re not online, you can schlep down to the courthouse/registry and look at them in person - they’re all public documents. I’d trust that a lot more than a “should be” from a lawyer.
And just because a lien hasn’t been filed yet, doesn’t mean there isn’t a subcontractor who is currently demanding payment from your GC who may file one in the future. That’s why you should consider contacting the subs directly.
And I sincerely hope your wife has gotten over her concern about “ruining the guy’s business”. Because you aren’t ruining his business - he did that all by himself.
I understand the reasoning behind it, I still think it’s BS. However, with your logic, couldn’t the homeowner claim the contractor and supplier were in cahoots to get the homeowner to pay both of them? A supplier could set up a contracting business, take on a bunch of work, close up shop and let the supplier (himself, in this example) collect a second time.
In any case, I think the system needs to be overhauled. Either it should work like every other business, that is, you collect from the person you sell the goods too or the suppliers need to bill the homeowner directly and the homeowner pays the supplier directly.
It’s not a whole lot different than if your favorite grocery store closes and suddenly your getting knocks on your door from their vendors trying to collect.
Even in my business (produce), any produce that we wholesale is still legally owned by us until it’s paid for. If the places closes up, we, the produce wholesalers, jump to the front of the line to get paid. But we certainly couldn’t go after anyone else further down the line. Oddly enough, this ‘protection’ is expensive ($995/yr plus, if you’re late, it’s a $995 late fee and something like $250/day that you operate without a license). And it’s illegal to operate without this ‘protection’. Feels like a racket to me.
Cite, if you’re interested.
ETA, when I got my new roof installed, I gave him half at the beginning of the project and half the day he finished. I asked for a lien release and he said since I paid right away there’s no lien, but wrote me a release just in case I needed it for anything going forward.
That’s a little more far-fetched, there’s just a basic assumption that if a homeowner has the materials and the supplier hasn’t been paid that the homeowner owes the supplier. The problem is proving there’s no monkey business going on, especially far in the future and that’s where the laws really fail. I assume in your Grandma’s case the contractor didn’t show up in court and admit it was his fault, probably neither Grandma nor the supplier could find this guy to sue him.
Suppose it happens 6 months after the fact though? If someone doesn’t have proof that they paid the contractor for the materials and the contractor can’t be found then who should get screwed, the homeowner or the supplier? The homeowner could be likened to someone who had received stolen goods, but they can’t return them to the rightful owner.
You are absolutely right that the law needs an overhaul. It’s just as easy for homeowners, contractors, and suppliers to screw each other by not paying or delivering goods and services. And justice is almost never achieved, somebody gets screwed every time. I can’t tell you how many local guys I know that have lived here their whole lives and won’t talk to each other because of contracting disputes going back over generations.
We could go back and forth over this all day. Those same arguments can still work in reverse.
We had a big problem here a few years back, there was a store (no idea if it’s local/regional/national) that sold a lot of home project type stuff. Flooring, cabinets etc. And, like Home Depot or Lowes, you could hire ‘them’ to do the installation, to which they sub it out to someone local.
A while back, the store went out of business. No one thought anything of it until a few months later when they were getting sued by the installers. Many of them no longer had proof that they paid and the ones that did were rather annoyed that they had to deal with this when it really didn’t involve them.
My family is in the produce business. The majority of the people in the produce business are A)Italian B)are part of a multi generational family business and B) have some type of mafia connection one way or another. And, of course, we all know each other and in many cases are related.
I know all too well about not working with other places over disputes that go way back.
We’re not disagreeing, I’m pointing out the reasoning behind the way the law is used because it is flawed. There’s an assumption that favors suppliers and contractors over their customers, and ends up with random customers paying for their losses. I can’t provide any justification for this. If I had to guess why I’d say contractors have more than their share of political influence in state politics and the deck got stacked long ago. Sure, the contractors shouldn’t get scammed either, but there must be better ways to protect everybody.
I agree and it could be handled just like lawyers and trust accounts. As this is such a big problem in the construction industry I don’t know why they haven’t considered such a thing.
If that was done, then when I write the contractor a check for $10k, that money can be easily forensically traced to show who got what and stole what and where and from who.
The homeowner should not be on the hook to the supplier when he, in good faith, paid the contractor to pay the supplier, and the contractor fraudulently converted his money for other purposes. If it is shown that the contractor bought from the supplier on a promise from the homeowner to later pay, then I have no problem with a statutory mechanism that lets the supplier recover from the homeowner. But let’s have a fair system to determine where the fault lies.
Update:
The inspector from the Registrar of Contractors came out and documented all the work that hadn’t been done, and sent a letter to the license holder, giving them 3 weeks to finish the work.
That resulted in a phone call from a very panicked guy, who was surprised as hell to get that letter. Turns out that the contractor was an employee of his, and was using his license without his permission. So, now it’s really complicated.
The business owner seems like a nice guy and is understandably upset by the idea that he might lose his license, and is looking at suing the contractor for fraud. My wife doesn’t want him to suffer any harm, but the only way that we are likely to get any money back is to sue him, and let him deal with recovering any judgment from the contractor. Our lawyer says that’s exactly what we should do, but I’m not sure we are willing to subject an innocent party to such damage.
So, many more sleepless night are in our future.
well the easiest way would be to cut a deal and have him finish the work the first guy started … and then he could sue him for the payment … you might not get the money back but at least the work will be done