Matt Walsh

It's not often that I do monologues where I talk about consumer protection issues or how to avoid getting scammed or anything like that.

But when it comes to buying homes,

So many people are now getting ripped off in ways that are, frankly, hard to comprehend in some cases.

And it's clearly time for a deep dive on that topic.

And we'll start with the numbers.

Now, ordinarily, hearing the news that many more single family homes are being built in the United States would suggest a good sign for the economy and for young people, many of whom are struggling right now to afford a starter home.

And indeed, over the past few years, the number of new construction single-family homes has increased, particularly in the West and in the South.

In fact, as the COVID lockdowns ended, there were roughly 1.5 million homes under construction, which was the highest number since the 1970s.

These new homes are a lifeline in the market because many existing homeowners who locked in their rock-bottom interest rates on their mortgages a few years ago are reluctant to sell.

But there's a very real risk to buying a new home in this market.

All over the country, major home builders are currently facing class action lawsuits, alleging shoddy construction and fraud.

They're building homes too quickly with low quality materials and they're selling them to inexperienced buyers who more often than not are relying on low quality, outdated inspections.

And then those buyers are discovering that under the terms of the contract they signed,

they don't have much recourse.

That's why there's now an entire genre of social media video where experienced inspectors go into homes and identify serious flaws that should have been fixed or at least disclosed to buyers before they purchased the home.

But put another way, we've come a very long way from the days of Hammurabi's code, which called for builders to be put to death if they did a poor job constructing a home.

And before we get into the wave of lawsuits that have been filed by homeowners, it's worth taking a look at some of those videos to give you an idea of the extent of the problem and to give you a sense of what to look for if you're in the market for a home at the moment yourself.

Now, people regularly buy items that cost around $1,000, like TVs, computers, and so on, which have much higher quality control than $500,000 homes.

It defies common sense for the biggest purchase of your life to be so unreliable and have so many issues.

And that works to the advantage of the builders.