What are the lessons one can learn from the two books?
The books have two major themes. One is that, for the “largest investment you’ll ever make” (i.e., your house), it is still caveat emptor all the way. People who buy a new home and never have serious problems are just plain lucky; they cannot begin to imagine the horrors of buying a defective home that the builder refuses to fix. It is caveat emptor or “buyer beware,” because if you experience this awful result (defective home, irresponsible builder) you are out of luck; there is no legal protection that has any real meaning to the buyers. A contract signed by bad people (read: amoral, dishonest) is worthless, and trying to enforce it is an exercise in futility. The key is not to rely on any contract but to prevent the problems from happening in the first palce. That is the first major theme. The second major theme has to do with bad people and injustice. We dealt with three particularly bad people – our home’s developer, architect and builder. In the aggregate, these three got away wi
