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About Rick Stone, Broker/Owner, CRS, ABR, GRI
Expertise
I am a licensed Real Estate Broker serving Virginia, Washington, D.C & the areas surrounding Cabo san Lucas, Mexico. I am currently involved in building homes in the Cabo area. I have served as chairperson for my HOA Architectural Review Board. I will do my best to respond to any related questions regarding the buying or selling of real estate.
Questions can be regarding your search in finding a great agent to work with and what to do with a bad one. Real estate agency, contract issues, home inspections, real estate investing and property disclosure issues. I'll do my best and wave my magic wand to get you out of problems concerning your builder or be happy to tell you what you should had known before you wrote the contract or before you do. How do you buy or sell raw land, tear down an old house and rebuild new, and all you should know about waterfront properties are good questions too.
I will say this, I am candid with my reposnces and do my very best to offer advice that may teach but there are cases where if as Forrest Gump's mother would say, "stupid is what stupid does" or something like that, I may have to scold you to get my point across.
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I'm proud to hold the following professional real estate designations: CRB, Council of Real Estate Brokers - CRS, Certified Residential Specialist - GRI, Graduate of the Realtors Institute and ABR, Accredited Buyers Representative. I am a member of the National Association of REALTORS, Mexican Association of REALTORS (AMPI) and the Los Cabos MLS. I own and sell waterfront properties so I can address issues related to living on the water. I represented a custom builder for many years and have sold hundreds of new homes so, fire away with your questions regarding new home construction.
I'll do my best to be straight up and help if I can or I will tell you if I can not and who to contact in that event. I am not an attorney and can not provide legal advice. If you are having a dispute with a seller or buyer who has failed to live up to the contract terms, or a tenant that is always late with paying their rent, while I may not be able to help, I may be able to offer suggestions and then who else to contact.
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You are here: Experts > Shopping > Home Buying/Selling > Buying or Selling a Home > Plumbing
Expert: Rick Stone, Broker/Owner, CRS, ABR, GRI
Date: 7/12/2008
Subject: Plumbing
Question
Hi,
I have lived in my house 17 mo. When I moved in Dec. of 2006 I had to call the plumbers a month or two after I moved in. I have two drains, one in my garage and one in the basement. The main drain is in the basement to. There was so much grease in the drain in my garage and all over the floor. In my base I'm not going to discribe that.
The house came with a warranty, but they were know help. I called a plumber out. They put a snake down in the garage drain and the basement. It cost over $200. My realtor got in touched with the owner and I got reinburst.
My basement is backing up again. I called the plumber. The plumber told me the problem I'm having started way before I moved in.
I looked on my seller disclosure statement. There is know mention of a backed up sewyer drain. There is all new plumbing in my basement. How can I find out if there was a problem before I bought my house?
Thank you
Barbara
Answer
Hello Barbara,
That you have now lived in this house for one and a half years, you are probably not going to get any further help from the previous owners but, there is no harm in trying.
While I do not place some blame on your REALTOR, they should had noticed if there was all this new plumbing work as you claim and at the time you first looked at the home and before you made your offer to buy this property, should had asked more questions. What comments did your home inspector offer regarding the plumbing?
If you are able to contact the sellers, ask what work they had done, tell them your plumber is telling you there is something else wrong outside of grease problem that you have already dealt with. Get the phone number for the company that did that work, contact them to tell them of your problems and see if they will offer any assistance.
I would also encourage you to call the county permit office, if a major plumbing job was done, there is a good possibility of a county permit being required. The county would have records of that work as well as if and when it was inspected.
Just give them your house address and if any permits were requested, they will have those records. Also, if there is no permit filed, and you claim the owners did a major job, the county may come to do an inspection. If they determine the seller did anything wrong, they may help you out in dealing with the sellers.
The reality is that whatever work that company did, it was far enough back in time that they can rightfully claim, the past owner or even you, did something since they completed their job to cause damage to their work and that their warranty is long expired. In all fairness, they would be correct in saying this unless it can be proved that they did a poor job.
As you note, it appears someone, possibly the past owner, poured grease down the drain and clogged it up. People who do this are just plain stupid. We all know this is terribly wrong to do, it causes so many problems not to mention it is devastating for the environment as well as causes expensive maintenance for the water treatment plants. Pouring hot grease down a sink could certainly have created a major problem especially if food scraps, hair from showers and such other things that find their way into sewer lines, get mixed up in it. I've seen people pour used motor oil down garage drains as well. People just do not think.
If this problem had become that serious shortly after you had moved into the house, you may have more legal ground to defend yourself. Now, 18 months or so later, you have discovered something else may be wrong, you are going to have a real problem getting the seller to pay for more repairs.
Another possibility is that the plumber you originally called, did not do a proper job in the first place to fully remove all debris from that sewer line and is blaming his faulty work on someone else and looking to get paid to do more work from you. I have certainly seen and heard of examples of that as well.
For the most part, sewer lines are straight forward. Once they leave the house, in most cases are a 4" or larger pipe that runs a straight line to the main sewer line. Any blockage is usually found in the house where there are turns in the pipe. This is where hot grease and debris collect and will eventually block.
As far as the disclosure statement, a Seller is only responsible to disclose known structural defects - if there was a problem before and the Seller took the proper measures to correct it, there was no duty on the Sellers part to say anything more about it.
However, if the contractor in their notes can show that while they noticed a bigger problem, the owner did not want to make all the needed repairs, but just enough to 'get by', then you might have a case against the seller because they were aware of a major problem yet did not properly correct it nor disclosed it.
I am sorry that I can not offer more help to you, this may be a situation that you are just going to deal with unless you can prove the seller intentionally lied or knowingly failed to fix a known problem.
Rick
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