Written 4-13-07 When the process started my realtor and I performed in depth research to find a solid, reputable builder, neighborhood, and product that we felt was the best fit for our family. We visited HuttoParke, a community built by Lennar/NuHome and met with Christine, toured some homes and picked out one in particular that we were interested in buying. We submitted our loan application with Lennars in house financing company as we were told that our loan would be approved faster and easier. We received approval on our loan and we were very happy with how smooth the process was going thus far.

Our disappointment with Lennar/Nu Home began with one of many visits to our newly purchased home. When we first visited our home we were told to look through it and see if there were any problems that we could see and point them out and it would all be taken care of by the time our final walk thru was scheduled. My wife and I started to put blue tape on areas that needed to have touch up paint and an area at the top of the stairs where the board had come loose and needed to be repaired. We returned later in the week and noticed that the spots we had put tape on were not painted. Puzzled, we asked the customer service specialist why these spots were not painted yet and he replied "there are going to be spots that need to be painted and even more after you move in which is why we leave a touch up kit". We were very upset with his comment as we felt that our concerns were being blown off. We continued to walk thru the house and put up more pieces of tape and noticed other things like a closet door that did not have a stopper, other doors that put indentions in the trim of other doors when they were fully opened ect.

We scheduled a time with the construction manager, Matt, to come back out to make certain these repairs had been done. We came back out to the house and met with Matt who showed us everything had been done except for the loose board at the top of the stairs. He explained to us that the repair man was scheduled to come by later that day and that it would probably be easier to close on the house and send any other issues to the warranty department. When we questioned Matt about the other issues like the interior doors ect., he replied to us

"The reason they do that is a Nu Home design and they have flaws. There are quite a few Nu Home floorplans that have flaws, that’s just the way it is." This really made my wife and I uneasy and did not make our realtor or Christine look good either. We informed Matt that our closing was scheduled for 12:30 the following day and we wanted All repairs to be done now and not after moving in with the warranty department. Matt told us "that would be fine and that he would open the home in the morning for our final inspection."

The following day we sent our realtor out to inspect the property prior to closing only for him to find the house still locked. He contacted the front office who was unable to contact Matt for over an hour and a half at which time he had to be at a different closing across town. By the time Matt finally got in touch with our realtor he had a very snotty attitude stating he had no intention of opening the house for him or us to inspect. Our realtor informed Matt that due to his lack of customer service he may have cost Lennar/ Nu Home the sell of this house which several people had spent a lot of time and work to make happen and in the event that the closing went on with schedule, we would certainly not be recommending Lennar to anyone anytime soon. Matt went on to state that “If the buyers don’t want the house or are unhappy with how I do my job then they don’t have to buy the home and will just sell it to someone else" . He also stated that the repairs that were being done were not apart of his job and that he was just doing them to be "nice."

So once again with egg on his face, our realtor came to us to apologize for this bad experience with our first new home purchase and to reassure us that he has had many closings with the Lennar corporation and had never seen this type of attitude from any representative before. Like lambs to the slaughter, we proceeded with the closing. I returned the following day after closing on the house to follow up on the repairs being made and was pleasantly surprised to see a nice little gift basket on the kitchen counter. I decided to leave the basket for my wife, as she desperately needed a good experience with the new home. Upon our return to the house later that day, I was shocked and deeply upset to see that the contractors had come into our house and stolen the gift basket right off the counter. Buying a brand new home for the first time is suppose to be a major milestone and a highlight in ones life but Lennar has managed to ruin that for us as you will continue to read. This was merely the beginning.

After our second week living in the home, I found a piece of hardyplank in the rear of the house that was bowing out and customer service replaced it. As a matter of fact, they replaced it so fast I was not able to find out what the problem was or what the fix could be.

One month after moving into our home, the garage door fell off the tracks. Again customer service replaced the issues. Only this time as I was driving through the neighborhood I noticed two other houses that had their garage doors hanging. I thought it was just a weird coincidence. "Wild" I thought to myself.

Six weeks after moving in we noticed the closet that the air handler was in was about 20 degrees cooler than the house. We also noticed the air was not cooling a downstairs bedroom and the upstairs room that was closest to the air handler. We called the warranty department and was put in touch with Casa (A/C repair). When they came out to look at what was causing the problems we were told that there was a pinched duct and a leak in the A/C unit. They "repaired" the problem that day and we are still unable to heat or cool those two rooms properly.

Eight weeks after moving in, my wife and I decided to start decorating. As we began to hang a decorative towel on the rack in the downstairs bathroom the rack fell right off the wall! No biggie I thought, the contractors must have been in a hurry and rushed the install on this one. I have some anchors in the garage I can fix this with. All houses are going to have minor problems I thought to myself.

Three months after the move date, my garbage disposal decided to quit working, and just in time for my first visit from my parents! I tried everything that I knew of to get it to work including pressing the reset button found underneath the unit, checking the braker, but nothing. I measured the circuit and found that it measured for 20 volts. I double checked all the wire nuts and just couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. So once again we contacted warranty and they sent a plumber out. The plumber replaced the disposal unit and when it still didn’t work he informed us that it was electrical. The electrician showed up, tested the wires, flipped the switch and voila, it worked. This is starting to annoy my wife and me.

Eight months into living in our home we started seeing work crews doing mass repairs on houses with their tail tale sign of mounds of sheetrock loaded into an awaiting trailer and insulation blowing around in the front yard like snow at Christmas time. We thought this was bizarre but had no idea of how this would involve us. Our neighbor across the street was having her driveway replaced as it was full of cracks when she came over to talk to us about potential problems. She told us about how she was having cracks running along the seam of her ceiling and side walls. My wife and I went room to room looking for any signs and we found several nails popping down from the ceiling and cracks in our driveway running into the garage and directly into the main slab.

We contacted Russ with Lennar and explained the problems to him. While we were waiting for something in writing from the Lennar associate about what was causing our problems and all the turmoil in the neighborhood, I decided to go into the attic and work my way down looking for anything that stood out. Thus began my photographic documentation and voice recordings of all visits from Lennar representatives. During our initial visit from Russ with Lennar he detailed work that was to be performed including the removal of all ceiling sheetrock on the second floor, and the re-pouring of our driveway. We questioned him further to find out the time line we were looking at and he told us "a couple of days". My wife and I are not experts in concrete but we know that it takes a little longer than that for the concrete to cure. We decided to take him on a tour of our house to show him the custom movie theater we had installed, the newly painted walls, ect. Russ returned the following day with plan "B". This new plan didn’t require any sheetrock removal and immediately threw up major red flags for my wife and I.

It seemed that they didn’t want to endure the complicated process of removing and re-installing our custom home theatre, which includes a movie projector, custom window treatments that slide across the windows to block out any light coming in to the room. We asked for something in writing about what the problem is, what the professional fix is going to be along with a list of all the companies that were to be involved in the process from start to finish so that we could research them with the Better Business Bureau. Along with this new plan, Russ informed us that we would have to move out of our house for about "7-10 days", $15 a day for food for my family of 4, a huge slap in our face. We were to entrust a moving company named Blue Whale moving company, a company with a history of property damage and losing hardware pieces to furniture to come in and move our stuff into either our garage or storage. As you can imagine we have absolutely no trust in any worker employed by Lennar after the gift basket was stolen.

Russ returned with a generic overview from DEH engineering specifying the problems and a list of companies that were going to be involved in the process and what their rolls were going to be. Upon further research, half the companies on the list are not registered with the Better Business Bureau. Some of the list includes people like Jose Lopez, how do you research someone like that when he isn’t affiliated with any particular company?

After talking with others in our neighborhood that are going thru the same thing we are and had been given the same reasons why this is happening, we found out that the repair work that is being done is not what is recommended by the engineering company. Now, on top of the huge hassle of having to pack up their house and be displaced for over two weeks, the loss of hardware to their bed resulting in them having to sleep on the floor, the extended delay of money to re-emburse them for their hotel and food expenses, they get to go through it all over again! Why in world would Lennar allow the exact same contractors that created this problem come in and "fix" the problem?

I started doing research about this problem and what others are doing about it and ran across a bill that was being presented to have a house lemon law enacted to protect consumers such as myself and my wife. My wife and I got further details and headed down to the capitol building. Shortly after our visit to the capital regarding the home lemon law we were contacted by KXAN news to be interviewed about shoddy homebuilders in the Hutto area. My wife and I did the interview, took the news crew on a tour of our house showing them all the nails popping through the sheetrock in the ceiling and all the other problems we are having. We were featured on the 10’ o clock news, and put on the front page of their website. After our news appearance we were contacted again by Russ and his boss Greg from Lennar. They wanted to meet with me and my wife to discuss what sort of options we had decided to go with and we explained that we don’t want anything done to our house until we can get a professional home inspector in to evaluate the problems and tell us what would be the best course of action. This conversation was of course voice recorded and supplemented with pictures we had taken in our attic of the obvious shoddy workmanship that we ran across. A check for the third party inspector was dropped off by Russ with Lennar two days later.

I currently have pictures of one of Lennars model homes being "fixed", classic. I have traveled across 1660 into the new neighborhood called Hutto Highlands (I have since bought that domain name) and saw the exact same shoddy construction that plagues our neighborhood in my opinion. I will be putting up photos to further document and warn others who are wanting to invest, not wanting others to go through what we are having to endure, a sort of public service if you will.

April 14, 2007: Being the owner of the domain www.huttoparke.com and freely advertising for Lennar and the neighborhood, at this point I was fed up. I removed any and all advertisements for the company that obviously had no intentions of standing up and making things right unless it was demanded of them. I have since converted the site over to what you see today.

May 10, 2007: As of now I am repeatedly recieving mail back from the state representives, US senator, and HUD offering avenues for me to get help. Last week I sent in my soil samples to the lab and expect to get the results back tomorrow or Monday the 14th. From a visual observation of a co-worker that deals directly with these types of things he said that it was definately expansive. Once I have the results in my hand it will be proof of what to expect from all structures built in our area. Already knowing that Hutto is centered in one of the governments topology reported hot spots for expansive clay I feel pretty confident all problems will be relational.

I had my house inspected and the inspector found a few things that I had not even remotely looked for. I will update this portion when I get time.

Mike and Natalie Crump

11-13-2007 Well it has been quite a while since we have updated our very own profile and several things have happened since May. The stories are all over the site and the information being gathered is much more than what is listed. The website itself has come leaps and bounds from when it was fist started. Our neighborhood has been featured on many news casts and papers and we are seeing the difference not only with the contractors being fined from lack of responsablility and supervision but also with new construction.

We have some photos of our slab and our backyard that we have put up for everyone that is interested in what is happening out here with the lack of ground treatment. We have also posted up a neighborhood a few miles away that Lennar is building homes in that is recieving gound treatment before building. This conflicting construction just raises all the more questions that have yet to be answered.



3-27-2008 I thought I would update on how our Lennar home was holding up. Lately we have been experiencing some electrical issues. The kitchen light mysteriously flickers on when off. You really notice it at night when the rest of the house is dark. Freaky. This past Sunday when my wife went to show her mother the loud popping noise the switch makes when operated was given a nice jolt of electricity. This has never happened before but now she uses a shoe to operate this switch. The garage light seems to be experiencing surges and brown outs while operating. Last night when walking into the master bath to brush my teeth I turned on the light and there was a loud popping noise. The vanity lights which is a strip of 6, got a surge turned on for a split second and then went out. This is a dual gang switch. One side works with the fan but the other seems to have crapped out. I have never seen a switch crap out. I know its not the circuit because this is the only leg of the circuit that quit working. How does a switch that has no parts except a rocker arm for continuity suddenly stop working? I guess I will find out later. Don't ever buy a Lennar home.