Mrs. AhhhCraig and I are in the market for a new home and toured a KB community in Pflugerville today. The models of course were gorgeous, but I have some real concerns of KB Homes in general, but not really sure why. Please share with me any insight that you guys have on KB. I want to hear the good the bad and the ugly. Also any information on Austin builders would be appreciated.
KB Homes has ****** over more people than you could imagine. Whole community groups across the nation have set up websites, etc discussing their horror stories. The guy who put up the KBHomesux.com(sp?) website got paid about a million to sell them the domain.
Thanks guys. This is pretty much the response I was expecting to hear. We will clearly not be buying a KB home.
Keep in mind that damn near EVERY home builder gives no more than a 2 year warranty & if your house starts to show signs of trouble (doors not fitting / sticking, leaks appearing in any location, tile cracking, etc) inside of 2 years than you got a REALLY crappy job. Most problems don't start to appear until @ least 5 to 7 years @ the soonest & I give a minimum of a 5 year warranty on my total re-roofing work. BTW, if you are in the market for a new house & will be building, spend the few hundred dollars (which will probably mean less than $ 2.00 a month on your mortgage) & get a 30 year / Dimensional type shingle on your house, even if everyone else is going with a 'standard' 3 Tab / 20 year shingle. Especially if it's a 2 story house.
I am a mortgage banker/ broker and I hear from the realtors we work with that KB is not good. Not sure what your price range is but there are some good ones out there. good luck
AhhhCraig....why in the hell do you want to build a new home in this ****** economy? The Austin area is was over saturated with new builds the past few years. Now there are foreclosures left and right. Now is the best time to buy a slightly used home. You can get some absolutely awesome deals all over Austin. Here in Cedar Park, $350K homes are going for $275K-ish these days.
I should have mentioned in my first post "new to us", not necessarily a brand new home. We are looking at several homes that are just a few years old. Sorry for the confusion. By the way, KB is completely off the table for the AhhCraigs. Thanks fellas.
I concur with the consensus that KB Homes is not that great, but you will find similar websites and feelings about any similar tract builder - Lennar, Pulte, Cen Tex, etc. You had the right idea checking with realtors. And don't necessarily check with your realtor because they are biased and want to seal the deal, so they may not be straighforward with you, if you know what I mean. Best of luck in finding a house!
one thing to keep in mind, if you end up building a house no matter the builder, you need to show up and inspect it often. Even if you have no idea what you are inspecting show up and act like you do. If the guys doing the work see you there a lot they are less likely to take short cuts. If you or a someone you know, have any knowledge, then I'd say ask lots of questions along the way as well. You don't want to be a nuisance and slow down construction but you want to make sure they are doing things right.
The Guadalupe County tax appraiser told me they automatically take 5% off the appraised value if it is a kb home.
Wow, interesting information. I guess it could be worse. You could be living in a Pulte Home built in San Antonio next to a hill/retaining wall. 80 homes evacuated. Wow.
BigWIll, there is the contractor. Now I know several of them and they all have told me the same thing, when they are doing tract housing they know exactly which houses have buyers that are going to bring in the tough inspectors. They have told me that they would build two houses that looked identical standing right next to each other however the difference was the contractor knew one had was going to have to meet a tougher inspector thus he'd challenge the workers when they said they did the job. One of the contractors I know worked for KB and specifically said that they were tought more of what to look for in the owners than anything about actually building the homes.
yeah...that's why I said "hire a professional inspector". And "the contractor" doesn't really exist on a KB like project. There are a bunch of subs that each have a foreman/superintendant. The superintendent on a production project is mostly concerned with maintaining production, as they have a very tight schedule when building such a project.
I had forgotten about this, but back when I was practicing I was working on trying to develop a class action against KB (class actions don't really exist much any more). Seems what they were doing was in an effort to cut corners, they were putting buckets in their slabs instead of building the recessed prtion of a slab designed to set a wing wall in. When the slab was poured, they would thewn remove the bucket and set the post directly into the soil. All of those houses had major termite damage.
