Yes, I have joined one in the past. No, I didn’t just jump on the bandwagon. Here’s the story:

We bought our home new from a developer who went BK shortly thereafter, during the 90s downturn. Therefore, we had noone to turn to for claims.

Fortunately, we had a house that held up well as did most (not all) of our neighbors. When the first class action was being organized, we declined because we had no issues to speak of. Several of our neighbors joined that first lawsuit and asked us to join, but we declined each time. I am not knowledgeable enough to know whether they had issues that needed to be remedied, but I have my suspicions.

That lawsuit ran it’s course, and they began to organize a second lawsuit. By this time, we did have a few relatively costly issues, nothing extremely serious but they did eat up a bit of cash (water damage, etc). We also had discovered things that were not uncovered by the initial walk-through, such as the fact that many of the roof tiles were not even nailed in and there was no paint whatsoever on the exterior trim that was very high off the ground. Obviously workers cut corners where they knew we wouldn’t look.

Again, there was no builder to turn to and the lawyers were quick to point out that the statute of limitations was about to run out on recovering any damages from the insurance carriers. Therefore, we joined the lawsuit. We eventually did get a settlement, and it basically covered the repairs that we had done to the house (by chance – they simply took the award and divided it amongst the homeowners). When we sold the home, we disclosed all of the above to the new owner and told them the exact repairs done.

One thing I did learn from the lawyers: even if the builder did not follow code and did unlawful things, they cannot be sued for that. From recent court rulings, you can only collect in a home defect lawsuit if the code violations, etc, led to some sort of secondary damage (water leakage, broken wires, etc).

Would I do it again? Probably – I was upset with the builder for leaving us in the lurch…there were several articles in the press about how they used clusters of companies to protect their assets from BK, complete with pictures of their mansions and expensive furnishings. And – I think I saw their name in the paper as owners of a new construction company awhile back, so they are still livin large (well, maybe not now in 2008 🙂 ). But I was also not real happy with the way the lawyers manipulated (in my opinion) the neighbors into feeling that they were all victims.

My advice: if you’re buying a new home, get an inspector up on that roof to tug on tiles and check paint pronto!