Unless the house was relatively new, I am not sure info about the builder would be very helpful. I might be able to find the name of the builder of my house in some records somewhere, but how will I then learn anything about the reputation that a builder had in the years in which my house was built?

Unless the builder has a set of subcontractors that s/he always uses, I would think that the quality of any particular home would depend more on what individuals with what skill sets were on site the day that certain events occurred during the build. I always think of SuzieSnowflake's experience whenever I think of the quality of a home - and her house never made it to completion before rot set in. I don't remember her story's details enough to know if her builder had a good reputation.

Then there is the possibility that repairs, replacement, or remodelling have changed the home since the original build.

As for home inspectors, I have just about given up all hope! Last time, I hired a friend of a friend, someone who was supposed to know a lot and be very thorough. I don't think I learned any more than I did when I hired the firm who sent out a guy who said the roof was quite new and had been a tear-off. He didn't notice that there was no roofing felt under the new section or that the entire front of the house was not torn off, but had an illegal third layer added!

I guess I would advise that you find someone with excellent inspection skills and read up on what signs to look for, yourself. I wish that I had hired my remodelling guru to do the home inspection for me. He may or may not be certified in that area, but he is one heck of a problem-solver and has seen it all when it comes to mistakes in building.

I don't know how to help you with the builder question, sorry.

I agree with nancy that home inspectors are not all equally qualified and as with many other professions it's hard to know how to find a good one.

For our recent purchase of a 15-yr-old home I looked on Angie's List to see what local recommendations were. We are new to this area and didn't have people to get referrals from, other than our realtor. One of the companies he suggested also had a very good ranking on Angie's List, so we went with them.

I wondered at the time if a buyer who was really serious about understanding a house's faults or potential faults should hire 3 separate inspectors for 3 separate days, and then read each report and then hire them to all spend another couple of hours going over the reports and house together, to see if they agreed on things. But I doubt that would be possible to set up, for an average buyer.

Here is a link that might be useful: Angie's List for referrals

To a certain degree it's important to know the builder of your home, there are some home builders in our area that have a reputation of putting homes up "overnight" and I wouldn't touch one of those homes with a six foot pole, those homes are in sub divisions that are all built by the same builder and are easy to find. I have found in years of looking at homes to look in sub divisions where homes are custom or semi custom and have not been unhappy with the quality of any of the homes we purchased in those subdivisions even though we actually did not know the builder of some of those homes. An inspector should be able to tell you if the home is constructed well and hopefully if well qualified should find any problems. I know some on this forum have not had the best of luck with inspectors, but we have had great luck and always thought of it as the best money spent in our home buying process. I wouldn't obsess about the builder as much as I'd obsess about determining the quality of the home itself.

Here is another site about Homebuilders ratings.

Here is a link that might be useful: Rate your Builder

I can't remember where but I once heard that JDPowers customer satisfaction surveys were paid for by the "winning company" (another words ... biased). I can not state this is fact but do some checking before relying just on that. Maybe someone here knows if this is true or not.

I would be worried about your builders reputation. I bought a home 2 years ago that was at the time 9 years old. We decided to spend a little more than we had planned on this house due to the fact that it was a "newer" home and figured we wouldn't have to worry about the roof, furnace, central air...big stuff. Inspector of my house and several neighbors never found anything wrong. First winter the furnace broke down several times, the central air broke down the first summer. We were advised by our furance guy to just fix it for now and see if it continues to break down. We found that both the furnace and the central air units are not large enough to heat/cool our house and that the same units were used for every house in our neighborhood regardless of size. We were also told that they are the type of furnace/central air units and will nickle and dime you to death. Our roof is failing, along with many other of our neighbors. Once we started talking to neighbors, everyone has the same complaint. The builder doesn't have a great reputation, but you don't really know this until you really start asking people. I'm not sure if your builder has built in neighborhoods where you could ask people...but I would highly recommend finding out if your house isn't too old. $6000 for a new roof and $6000 for central air/furnace is alot of extra that were definately were not planning on spending on a house that is only 11 years old.

lancir-
Yes, it does rain in Seattle, but there is actually less precipitation here than in many other places around the country (see link below). We also do not have hot or cold temperature extremes. As someone who has owned homes in the Seattle area for over 30 years, I think you are overly concerned about "wear and tear." I also think that reliable info on a builder is both hard to obtain, and of questionable value. I think your best resources are your own eyes, the disclosure statement, a competent inspector, and the neighbors (if they have the same type of house).

Here is a link that might be useful: Seattle precipitation

Yeah, it's funny how Seattle has gotten that reputation for being so rainy. Where I live, we get 10" plus more precipitation than Seattle does (Mystic, CT) and we're not known as being "wet". Strange?

I also think you're putting too much emphasis on the builder. As people have already said, so much can change from the original build over even a relatively short ten years. I think the only way it might have any real useful meaning would be if you were to purchase a home in a standard subdivision of 100's of single-builder homes. Then, maybe, you could make some type of comparison.

Other than that, learn yourself what to look for, hire a competent realtor, inspector, attorney, & walk the property & the neighborhood. Talk to the neighbors...knock on doors. They'll be glad to talk to you.

I think you're doing the right thing to check out the builder. Rather than look at those JD powers surveys (useless in my opinion as the actual surveys do not ask the right questions), knock on some doors or see if you can find people walking around or in their yard and tell them you're thinking of moving into the neighborhood and ask them if they've had any problems. You probably don't have to worry all that much about it though or obsess over it.

This is long I guess you hit a nerve? :) Others may dissagree but this is my own opinion based on my own RECENT experiences here and those of several freinds. I understand and agree with you about wanting a nice solid house. Do not asssume that new in the booming Seattle area will equal a quality, trouble free home. Older, but well maintained, may be as good or better. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your point of view) the extremely rapid appreciation of home prices means that almost anyone associated with home building in the recent past has been able to make money. Many, many, homes have been built or re-modelled recently for speculation. People have gone in to the building/buying process planning to live there only three years or so, and then move on.

Many builders, suppliers, and subs, have developed the wretched attitude that as long as the problem is not imediately obvious they will get away with cheap, shoddy, or outright deffective work. Because of boom conditions some are poorly trained or just plain too new at what they do to understand the consequences of their mistakes. Recent laws removing the buyers right to litigation in most instances have made it hard to go after the above if you do catch anthing. Buyers have exacerbated the problem by looking almost exclusively at resale values. There has been a HUGE emphasis on looks vs. actual structural integrity. The attitude that "If you don't like a house you can sell it and move- most likely making a big profit- so where's the problem?" seems INMHO to be salving the conciencence of many.

Many problems are hard for even a professional to detect. My DH is a structural civil engineer (a !#** certified expert in construction), and stuff got by us for heavan's sake.

OK I painted a fairly bleak picture, but I want you to understand that even if YOU DO EVERYTHING RIGHT, you STILL may have problems. I want you to move here with your eyes open and to wind up with a home you enjoy. There are of course many, many, nice homes, it has just become a little difficult to tell which ones they are. It realy is a wonderful area, very vital with lots to do and interesting people, everything grows here, and I find the weather agreeable with no bug problems. You can realy enjoy the outdoors.....I could go on and on.
What do I suggest?

Do all the sensible things you can do to protect yourself and obtain a well maintained trouble free home, but realize there could be a problem you miss.

Do hire the best home inspector you can find, but understand he could also miss something.

Do talk with neighbours and try to find out how the houses are built and if there have been any problems, but realize they may not know, or want to be honest with you ( they may be planning to sell soon and not want to go on record as knowing about any problems, or they may be freindly with your seller and uncomfortable telling the "whole" truth).

You can try and find out about the builder and if he is a known problem RUN, but you may not be able to find out much. Also a "good reputation", while a helpful plus is still no guarantee. The builder of our home had one, and there are still things we will have to pay to fix, things that a "good builder" should not have done.

I would spend some extra time and energy on a couple of things I don't see mentioned that you CAN be sure of. Most homes have a sort of personality, YOUR HOME should be a place YOU want to be. Do you like the neighbourhood? Is the house well sited, with sun and light in the right places so that the house will be cheerful over our often short, dark, winter days? Privacy if you are a private sort of person? Interesting, safe places to walk or run if you enjoy those activites.

If you are a gardner is there room and proper sun exposure to allow you to grow plants you love? (roses grow no better in the shade here than anywhere else, although we have more of it).

Lots of places have homeowner's restrictions, find out about them. A freind of mine moved into a place that required her to leave the yard and exterior "natural" she can not plant so much as a daffodil. I AM NOT KIDDING her homeowner's association is THAT restrictive. If there is a HOA get the agreement and read it, twice, to make sure you want to live with the rules.

You should feel, whatever your price range, yes I could live here! Try to FOCUS on what you can, and cannot, change. Paint is easy and cheap, carpet not hard, but a little pricy, a power tower, or major highway noise, impossible. The items you do not like about the house should be ones you can fix or live with never ones you cannot change.

Whatever you decide, I wish you the best. Worse things can happen than that you have to rent awhile and look at lots of places.

You might be able to do a search to find out if a particular builder has ever been successfully sued. Not sure how easy/hard that would be (do you know any lawyer friends who could give a quick opinion?), but it's an idea. I saw on the Building a Home forum that one poor woman who had a devastating experience with a terrible builder advises people to hire a private investigator to check out a builder prior to contracting for a home build. (one problem with bad builders is that they can easily change the company name and continue to build bad houses; an investigator could find out about the whole history). That's extreme, but the downside of getting a shoddy house is huge.