Montgomery County Texas New Homes

I was looking at a new home in Magnolia the other day. After I was done my Client made the comment "We moved out here and had a custom home built because we thought they were built better than ones in Houston."

I hear that a lot. For some reason homebuyers think that by moving out "in the country" or out to "Montgomery County" they're automatically going to get a better home. That's far from true.

Actually, the further you move out into the county and away from incorporated areas, the more your chances are of getting a shoddy home.

The theory that some Builders in Montgomery County seem to have is there is no one watching over their construction so why bother with those nit-picky building codes!

For example, the new home I mentioned at the beginning of this post was in Westwood. It had

• no AFCI breakers
• the smoke alarms did not sound simultaneously
• the windows that should have had safety glass did not have them
• all outlets in the Kitchen were not GFCI protected
• the grounding rod for the electrical system was not 1/2" in size
• none of the switches in the home were grounded
• the roof bracing was under sized
• the yard was not graded properly
• the brick walls moved easily when pushed on

These are just a few of the Building codes that were not followed. These are items that I rarely see missing in homes in cities such as Spring, Katy, Houston, Pearland, Kingwood, Sugar Land or The Woodlands.

The above mentioned discrepancies are ones I routinely find in home built in Westwood, Bentwater, Walden, Cape Royale (Lake Livingston) plus many other subdivisions and rural areas.

Sellers of newer homes (less than 5 years old) in these areas are often shocked to find that their homes were not built to any Building codes. This leaves these Sellers a few options when these and other Building and Safety Code violations pop up on the Buyers Inspection Report. These options may include:

1. Paying for the needed repairs out of their pocket
2. Reducing the asking price of their home and letting the Buyer fix all discrepancies
3. Do nothing and risk the sale falling through
4. Trying to get the Builder to fix these items (good luck on that one!)

Don't get me wrong, I live in Montgomery County myself and love it. There are some really good Builders in the County, but there are far more bad apples than good ones. There are some that have never had to build to Building Codes and honestly do not know what the current standards are. They rely on their sub contractors to follow the Building codes.

So before you pull up roots and move to the country because you think your Custome Home Builder will be better than the Spec Home Builder, just be aware that everything is not the way it seems on the surface. Buyer beware!