[AnnyS]

Hope this is in the right category...

SIL bought a house about a year ago. Following recent rains the roof started leaking. An insurance assessor went out to take a look and is of the opinion that the roof was not built according to construction standards and will need to be replaced entirely. The house is 3 years old. Her insurance company has told her that they will not be covering the roof repairs, and told her to claim off the builder's warranty insurance. She is currently renting the place out so will probably lose rental income whilst the repairs are being done.
So, having never been in this situation before, some questions:

- how do you go about making a claim on the builder's insurance eg do you contact the builder, or go to their insurance company directly?
- do you need to get a report on the defects from another builder, or would the insurance company arrange that?
- would the warranty insurance also cover things like loss of rent?

Any help on this appreciated!

Thanks

[JRA]

She only claims off the builders warranty insurance if the builder has gone broke.

She needs to contact the builder.

Our house/roof was repaired again and again by the builder for 9 years. The warranty is only 7 but the same problem persisted, so they couldn't ignore them.

So she just rings the builder.

[TootToot]

She only claims off the builders warranty insurance if the builder has gone broke.

Not sure if the answer will vary by state but in NSW you can only claim home warranty insurance if your builder has disappeared, died or become bankrupt. So the PP is correct in that in the first instance she needs to contact the builder. If the builder refused to cooperate, you would then complain to Fair Trading.

Structural warranty used to be 7 years but I believe it is/will become 2 years so another option would be to ring Fair Trading and check what your warranty period actually is. I believe their web site has a FAQ area which may also help.

[AnnyS]

Thanks. She is still waiting to hear back from her insurer as to the details of the supposed defects and basis of rejecting the claim, but calling Fair Trading sounds like the next step.

[JRA]

Call her builder would also be a good next step

[tick]

We had a similar problem. The builder is definitely the person to call. I kinda wished he had gone out of business so that we could claim builders warranty insurance, that man was impossible to deal with. It took him 2 full years to finally fix the problem and associated damage!

Good luck with it.

[AnnyS]

Re the initial contact with the builder, who does seem to still be in business, is it worth getting a lawyer to write a letter to them, so they sit up and take a bit more notice, so to speak? Or does SIL save this for later if things get difficult with the builder?

Also, as the insurance assessor only looked at the roof, can SIL ask the insurance company to inspect the rest of the structure, in the event there are other defects which would be exclusions from her now diminishing insurance cover?

Thanks

[roses99]

Call her builder would also be a good next step

This.

Don't bring in the big guns yet. It might not be necessary. And if you do start with lawyer's letters etc, your SIL will risk getting off on the wrong foot.

We are currently going through this process ourselves, except in our case we've got a leak from the bathroom. First step was to contact the builder. He came and took a look and now he is going through the process of getting the other various tradespeople to try to identify the problem (wet seal people, tiler, plumber etc).

When we first discovered the leak, I went through the building contract so that I knew what the process would be. By not accusing our builder of dodgy work or straight to Fair Trading etc, we have managed to cooperate well through a time-consuming and inconvenient process.

[roses99]

Re the initial contact with the builder, who does seem to still be in business, is it worth getting a lawyer to write a letter to them, so they sit up and take a bit more notice, so to speak? Or does SIL save this for later if things get difficult with the builder?

Think about this. If you were a builder and something went wrong with your work, would you want to hear from the client with a friendly phone call? Or would you want to receive a letter from a lawyer?

[AnnyS]

Think about this. If you were a builder and something went wrong with your work, would you want to hear from the client with a friendly phone call? Or would you want to receive a letter from a lawyer?

Point taken (from you and the PP). SIL has never been through this before (nor have we) and we have heard so many horror stories about builders.

Thanks