21 Utah Homeowners File Claims Alleging Their Homes Are Sinking, And They Have Photos To Prove It.
Several homeowners in a Utah subdivision are suing their home builder over allegations that their homes are sinking.
Twenty-one newly constructed houses in the area of Nephi, UT are suspected to be developing cracks and sinking into the ground.
Realtor.com® received a public complaint filed earlier this year in which 21 couples in Nephi, about 80 miles from Salt Lake City, said they were led to believe their homes in the Winn Ridge Community met high safety and construction standards.
Now, about a dozen families are suing local companies and construction sites, alleging that their homes are suffering from severe structural problems.
They argued that the buildings were built on collapsible soil and that important engineering safeguards had been ignored.
According to the complaint, the houses built in 2022 and 2023 have created many problems. The plaintiffs describe cracks in the walls at the door and corner windows, uneven floors, doors that won’t stay closed, and floor cracks that they say are letting in “dangerous levels of radon.”
The homeowners sued Riding Siding Construction, the company that built these homes; Salisbury Homes, which reportedly handled sales; three sales agents; and GeoStrata, which allegedly prepared the land report.
Realtor.com reached out to Riding Siding Construction, Salisbury Homes, and GeoStrata for comment and did not respond.
Homeowners are speaking out
Chelsea Rios and his family moved into the newly built house in November 2022, but he told FOX 13 News they started noticing cracks in the walls less than two years later.
The Rios family, who say they paid $700,000 to build their home, are now out.
“It’s emotional,” Rios told FOX 13. “I’m having a hard time going inside and going into my kids’ rooms. It’s really sad. This was our house. We expected to be here for a while.”
“It felt very unsafe,” said her husband. Edgar.
Chelsie Rios said: “We worry about wires being pulled and fires starting, or fuel lines breaking, pipes breaking. This is our biggest investment. We have no other debt except our house.”
The owner of the house Dallas Doane told ABC 4, “We moved here with the goal of finding our forever home with our girls and raising them, but now we’re in a situation where we’re not sure what our future holds. We can only hope that the house is stable and secure and there’s no cracks.”
Doane continued, “We hear sounds like a wooden baseball bat hitting a baseball really hard. [In] Our family room, you can see a lot of cracks and crevices and our ceiling and a noticeable change in the basement.”
Inside the suspicion
The lawsuit alleges the builders knew Winn Ridge’s soil carried “moderate to high collapse strength,” according to a geotechnical report GeoStrata allegedly provided to Salisbury Homes in June 2022. According to the soil report, they were instructed to add between 6 and 10 inches of fill soil, depending on compaction.
However, the complaint alleges that Riding Siding and Salisbury Homes did not comply.
“Salisbury Homes and Riding Siding failed to comply with geotechnical report requirements, including, among other things, failure to comply with foundation drainage, failure to comply with building fill requirements, failure to have a geotechnical engineer on site during excavation, and failure to conduct collapsible soil tests of the lot,” the lawsuit said.
The plaintiffs also accuse GeoStrata of neglecting to perform the required inspections.
“The alleged fraud by the homeowners involved failing to disclose sensitive information about the condition of the properties and how the soil had been prepared—or not properly prepared,” Chase Wildeattorney for the plaintiffs, told FOX 13.
“Homeowners have faced a lot of pressure and worry about the stability of the large sums they made when they bought their homes,” said the complaint. “More importantly, homeowners suffer mental stress every day and worry about the safety of their children and themselves as they watch their homes fail.”
The cost of repairing the damage
They are not complaining Mike and Brandee Wing shared an estimate with FOX 13 from a foundation repair company that describes the scope of the repair, which could include digging under the home, raising the structure, and installing support beams.
The estimated cost is over $267,000—more than half of what Wings originally paid.
“They don’t really want to move,” Wilde told FOX 13. “They don’t want to sell their house, they just want to fix it up.”
The homeowners alleged 10 claims against the defendants, including fraud, negligence, civil conspiracy, and violation of Utah’s Consumer Sales Practices Act.
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs are seeking “general, special and consequential damages” in an amount “to be proven at trial, but believed to be several million dollars.”
