When Jason & Keri Brown, the buyers of 6 Whitten Street in Greenville, South Carolina, discovered a secret room behind a bookshelf they were surprised. When they walked in, they were horrified by their discovery. It was all revealed in the mysterious handwritten note: “You Found It!” The note went on:
“Hello. If you’re reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out.”
But it was not just any mold. It was the Stachybotrys mold, also known as “Toxic Black
Mold“, which can cause respiratory bleeding in infants. The Browns, who have a young daughter, could not live in the house. They filed suit against the broker and agent, who denied knowing about the secret room or the toxic mold. They said the buyers bought the house “as is”.
The Browns did a home inspection but, like most standard home inspections, it did not include a mold inspection.
The lesson to homebuyers: get a mold inspection as part of your home inspection and make sure your contract of sale contains a clause that the house is free of any mold.
Source: WYFF4, Greenvile News.
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Technorati Tags: homebuyers, home inspection, mold inspection
Phew!!
I’m glad it was only mold they found there!
They’re lucky they didn’t find the secret nursery like on the Adult Baby episode of CSI.
Talk about strange, this is it:
http://www.babyapparels.com/
Mold is all around us, every day, in all the air we breathe. In anything but a desert-type of environment, it’s impossible to keep a home and the air “mold-free”.
Stachybotrys mold is certainly bad news and intentional concealment and cover up of the mold sounds like solid grounds for legal action to me.
Of course, everyone goes after the Realtor but this sounds like it’s clear cut that the previous owners knew and deliberately avoided disclosure which would have meant expensive mold remediation and, most likely, selling at a much lower price.
Re: home inspections. Even if a specific mold inspection wasn’t used the home inspector should have been able to find the secret room. After all, the new owners did. That’s who they should go after.
Makes you wonder what else the seller did not disclose about the condition of the property. This was complete deception by the seller.
I agree with with Ken. AS a Home inspector myself, Making a mental note of what the outside of the structure looks like would have been a signal as to what the interior should be like. I probley would have found the room (maybe) but atleast known there was space that could not be accessed. Yes, mold inspections are out of the scope of an home inspection. I do feel the old owners should be sued. And the realtor?… well depends if he/she knew the room was there.
look up the original article. it was a foreclosure. the owner put the note in the hidden room so that once it was found the new owners would know it to be mold. the former owners reasoning was that if the note was left on a counter, a realtor would throw it away because it interfered with business and disclosure would prevent the house from being sold… which is exactly what happened. it was a bank that sold the house, not the owner. one would expect the bank to send an inspector to a house.