At this point, it was time to confront the “flipper”. If you know Joe and I at all, you know that we are very transparent and communicate extremely effectively. When we looked at our “home”—what we were promised versus what we sat in now—we could not just sit around and take it. We had to talk to him and let him know what he had done.
Luckily, I am an amazing social media sleuth. Within minutes I had his phone number and home address. I called him but he did not answer. I texted him and told him that we had just bought his property and we needed to chat.
He called me back within an hour.
I saw his number pop up and my stomach churned. I took a deep breath and looked down at what I was wearing—turns out, I had put my big girl pants on this particular morning.
Let’s go.
Once we got through the pleasantries I informed him that this was going to be a very awkward conversation, but it had to happen. I told him that we know he flipped this house improperly, unethically, and created a home that was not safe. I asked him if he had business insurance to file a claim through.
He said he did not. There was no need to have business insurance as he did not have any employees. So this was the level of professionalism that we were dealing with.
He asked if he could come to the house and see for himself what we were talking about and have a face to face conversation with us. I told him that would be appreciated. Although I will say at the the time I was concerned Joe may kill him. I knew this conversation was going to be tense and awkward but we had to do it. It was the most natural next step.
He showed up to the house about thirty minutes late. He wasn’t defensive when he walked in, but was shocked to enter into a construction site when the last time he saw the property it looked the way that a home would look. We begin by showing him the pictures of the very clearly covered up issues that we found. He initially tells us that he didn’t do anything to this house but put a fresh coat of paint on the walls. Joe and I stared at him in silence and let the silence draw it out of him. Then he tells us that he laid the floor. So we showed him the pictures of the floor that was clearly covering wet/moldy/water damaged flooring beneath. He said “I know what it looks like, and it doesn’t look good for me, but I didn’t know that was there.”
Again, we sat in silence.
He said “Okay I knew there was some water damage somewhere because the tenant that was here before told me that there was and he believed the roof was leaking.” We asked if he ever visually inspected the leak when he owned the house and the tenant had told him that.
He said no, that he had just given the tenant $500 credit to get it fixed. He told us that we had no reason to demo what we did to the house.
I, being the amazing sleuth that I am, asked him if his young child was sleeping in that room (the one with the water damage), and he kept peeling back layers to find more and more cause for concern, where would he have stopped? At what point could he ever deem any of this safe? He said he didn’t know, but he would not have done this.
At this time, Joe was boiling. Joe said “if you didn’t go to this extent if you’re family was going to live here you are either a complete idiot or you don’t care about your family’s safety.” He told us no matter what, he’d be able to sleep well at night knowing he did this flip correctly.
Joe asked him if he would still be able to sleep well if we hadn’t touched this and ended up dying in a fire in our sleep, Joe asked if it would take our son suing him for our deaths to get him to wake up to the danger of what he does? The flipper said “yeah that’s probably what it would take.”
We knew at this point that this conversation wasn’t going anywhere, but we had one more question. We asked him why he didn’t disclose that this house was on a septic system and he said that he didn’t have to, and it was the fault of our realtor for not looking into it for us. He said this entire thing would have been avoided if we hadn’t had such a young realtor. He told us that he actually had to coach her on how to do her job.
So this entire thing could have been avoided if we didnt have a young realtor.
The house that he created. That he covered up. The safety hazards he made—all could have been avoided if we had a different realtor.
When I spelled out how stupid that sounded to him, he stil stood by it!
We ended the conversation by letting him know our next step would be to hire an attorney, and we have all the proof of his cover ups where he has no proof that he did anything correctly.
He told us “My attorney said that because you didn’t let me know prior to demo that I’ll win the case so good luck.“
This is going to be a long, hard battle.
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