Banjo, it's not sensationalizing when a $1000 roof repair turns into a whole house condemnation at a total loss.
How many $200k houses do you have near you? When the law condemns and declares a house like that a total losses are they not $200k losses?
Many of the houses that ended up condemned had maybe one square of shingle damage and the "blue tarps" only helped the short term.
If you have never been to the subtropics you might not realize that it doesn't take very long for damp buildings to go moldy.
Many of the folks we were working with were having to to wait 3 to 6 months and sometimes 9 months before they could get their roofs repaired.
It would often take 6 weeks to get someone to even look at the roof.
Having spent 3 winters there fixing storm damaged trees I have seen it first hand. All it took was a county inspector to write mold down on the form and it was a done deal, condemned.
Once the house was condemned there was no choice, the house had to come down. A total loss from what would have cost less than a couple hundred in materials plus labor to repair in the first place. All because of a law that was supposed to "protect" the consumer.
The other unintended consequence of those consumer protectionist rules was that if the house was condemned it had to come down and you couldn't necessarily rebuild the same house.
There were numerous 2br homes on nice lots that were mold condemned but the community rules stipulated something different, like a 3br or 4br, had to go on such a lot.
They have something in Florida called deed restricted communities that specify such things, and more!
So now what may have been a $200,000 home might easily cost half again, if not more, to replace.
As unbelievable as it sounds that's the way things worked in Charlotte County Florida after the Hurricanes of 2004 & 2005.
