Poor housing construction quality since the 1990s and particularly since 2000s.
Put yourself in the shoes of a fatcat builder building 200 new homes in 2004. You know for sure that as soon as the homes are built, they will be sold (sight unseen to "investors" in most cases). So you sit down to ponder if you should use quality construction materials and quality construction workers or if you should use the cheapest possible materials and workers.So you think - well, buyers don't see plumbing parts, and cheap plumbing parts work as well as quality plumbing parts for the first few years (then cheap plumbing parts leak and cause major mold; but that will not be my problem since I am selling homes when they are new). I will save $1,000 per home if I buy the cheapest possible plumbing parts, so on 200 homes that's $200,000 net profit in my pocket - or free high-end Porsche in my garage.
Then you think - well, a free high-end Porsche is nice, but a $400,000 speedboat would also be nice. Come to think of it, roofs on homes don't need to be thick. They do have strong winds in the area, but thin roofs will hold just fine for the first few years, then thin roofs will start being blown away by wind gusts, but what happens in a few years is not my concern. So that's another $2,000 per home savings if I go with cheap thin roofs, or an extra $400,000 in my pocket; just what I was looking for.
Then you think - it looks like the homes can be built like a complete junk that will fall apart in five years, but buyers will not care. So I am going to use the cheapest possible materials for everything. That will save me $20,000 per home, or an extra free $4 million in my pocket for doing nothing and being smart about business.
The above scenario was going on with most new home developments since the year 2000, and to a lesser degree since the 90s. The absolute worst construction was since 2002.
“‘Because so much was going up so quickly, you had subcontractors on the job who didn’t have experience building a 30- or 40-story high-rise on the ocean,’ says Stacy Bercun Bohm, a construction attorney in Fort Lauderdale. ‘You had subcontractors here from other parts of the country getting in on the boom, but they had no experience with environmental factors such as salt air and the humidity here.’”
The best thing to do is to not buy homes built between 2002-2007 at any price and to inspect very thoroughly and to be extremely careful with homes built between 1995-2002. Buying a home built between 2002-2007 is like buying a car that went through several floods - it may look great on the outside, but you know it will fall apart in a few years.