NEW HOMES, NEW HEADACHES.

• Position: Brief Article

As the availability of resales decreases, a number of potential buyers are turning to newly constructed homes, built to their exact specifications, sometimes within the many new neighborhoods popping up across the country. While buying a newly constructed home means that you are the first owner and everything looks and smells brand new, there are often flaws, some serious and expensive, that may be present due to use of inferior materials or faulty workmanship, warns Mike Kuhn, director of technical services at HouseMaster, the nation's largest home inspection firm.

New home flaws are typically hidden to the untrained eye and require a professional inspector to foresee potential difficulties down the road. The inspection of an older, resale home, on the other hand, typically looks for "wear and tear" items, such as a run-down furnace or problems that may have occurred over time, like water damage from roof ice dams.

Since the new home is cosmetically pleasing, with shiny new floors and sparkling fixtures, buyers may overlook the possibility that building codes have been violated, inferior building materials used, or workers may not have been properly trained. "We've seen cases where the home buyer would have been better off buying an older home that needed some minor repairs, but bought a brand new home that ended up draining his bank account in just a few years," Kuhn points out. "The old real estate adage, `buyer beware,' is truer than ever, even with new, sometimes pricey homes."

Some typical deficiencies reported by inspectors during evaluation of...