Me too! But then again, when competition gets worse, you're incentivized to not give free info to your competitors.

Might be an opportunity to make such a site?

I'm glad you can't. Unverified comments would be such a nightmare that potential buyers should ignore them while not really being able to (not to mention sellers), while I distrust both the competency and alignment of Zillow or similar to have verified comments that are more beneficial than unverified comments.

I would like a way for serious problems to not be covered up, but I believe you're going to need to do this by tying it to a home inspector's license, such as obligating "serious" problem reports to a registry which anyone could query for a fee that would be nominal for any serious potential buyer. Perhaps 0.05% of the property's highest-ever sale price, or $100, whichever is higher? Maybe some of that fee goes to the home inspectors who did the reports, to encourage serious-problem-free reports. Still lots of problems and abuses to mitigate, but that has the potential to provide a net benefit, unlike comments on Zillow.

I would also not expect buyers to normally avoid their own home inspection by using such a report, it would simply be another fee -- which I dislike -- though as a nearly-instantaneous result, I see a way to structure it to fit after the contingent offer is accepted (or perhaps just before submitting the offer) and before hiring their own inspector. The buyers now have a chance to address their specific concerns about the severe-problem report by what they ask from their own inspector.

You could provide aggregate statistics on home inspectors to show competency. "Harry the Home Inspector is [above average / in the top 20%] when ranking for not missing severe problems that were reported by other inspectors within [a certain timeframe]." But now you have to track repairs that explain why one inspector didn't report what another did.

You can name your price in the Houston market right now. The same is likely true for ATX and SA, but I don't have active properties in those markets.

The winds shifted about a year ago. Pull up any property in the north Houston area (Conroe, etc) if you really want a punch in the gut relative to your current desired market.

I had a local around Cincinnati say all the Ohio sucks memes are part of a concerted effort to convince people it's terrible here and they shouldn't come. A friend from Portland said they tried this years ago, telling everyone it did nothing but rain in the Northwest, and it didn't work.

Really though... this is a result of three things working in tandem: chronic underbuilding of housing especially in some areas, a prolonged period of low interest rates, and financialization of housing. The underbuilding of housing is driven by both NIMBYism and a particularly bad boom-bust cycle in housing a few years ago that scared off a lot of builders.

Teach them to build their own house. Built one for ~$60k recently, to buy anything comparable on the market in my area is $300k+.

The market prices an absolutely insane premium on being the guy that takes the risk to build a house.

Also needs to have state set requirements first what counts as an inspection as companies like lenar set their own rules about what can be inspected.

In my country, an inspection is required for the mortgage lender, is this not also the case for the US?

How do you envision this helping?

There are limits to home inspections, and many types of defects you're just not going to see. For example, that leaking water line causing a brown spot on the wall that reappeared after a week could be slightly slower and only reappear after a few months. Many problems take time to manifest as symptoms, and especially with a newly constructed home there just hasn't been enough time.

That's not even getting into the types of scams I've heard of where builders/sellers do things like "seal" the attic access hatch for "energy efficiency" reasons, and then assert that home inspectors cannot go up there because opening the door would be causing damage.

I'd say the real problems here are the high pressure sales funnel, and the complete lack of legal accountability. Forced arbitration and other onerous terms should be illegal. Heck if we're talking about a professional builder with a large inventory, liquidated damages themselves should mostly be illegal. And newly built homes should have mandatory warranty periods longer than a year, probably at least 5 years, culminating with an independent inspector at the end to notice any still-developing problems.

Claims shouldn't be going directly to the builder which then trickles down to some disempowered guy in a van who claims to have solved the problem with whatever he had on hand, but rather the homeowner should be able to choose any contractor to fix the problem and file a claim on the builder's insurance.

I don’t think the person quoted is implying that it should be that way, merely pointing out a discovery that builders have made: they _can_ get a symbolic bonus. One can skip building to code… do a quick and bad job and move on to the next job, saving cost and moving onto the next paying job more quickly. That “bonus” doesn’t exist if you build to code (and of course it shouldn’t exist, but neither should the bonus that does exist, your stick should prevent it).

> Having a warranty is one thing, exercising is can be an entirely different challenge.

Which is the point of the second half of my comment and the link to an interview with folks that had this exact problem. (Also why I started with the word "theoretically", as how actual legal coverage works in practice can be different.)